Graham smiled. Then suddenly he saw the opening for which he had been waiting. ‘One of the signs of a real friendship is not to be afraid to speak openly to your friend of all that concerns both him and you.’ ‘Ah, that means you have something rather unpleasant to tell me, doesn’t it?’ Brocklehurst inquired with a not unkindly irony. ‘Friends should have no secrets from each other, I expect?’ ‘They ought to share everything,’ Graham replied simply; ‘and more than anything else they ought to share their thoughts.’ Brocklehurst paused. ‘Shall we sit down here,’ he asked, with a faint sigh, ‘before we begin?’ ‘You make it very hard for me,’ Graham murmured, colouring a little. ‘Ah, you mustn’t mind that.’ They seated themselves on the trunk of a fallen tree, and a rather awkward silence followed. Below them the ground sloped down, forming a little glen of trees and brambles, through which a narrow stream ran. The sunlight threading its way between the branches turned the raindrops upon the mossy grass to tiny globes of fire; and everywhere there was the fresh, life-giving smell of spring, of earth and moist vegetation. Brocklehurst sat with his chin between his hands; and his face, absolutely immobile, might have been carved in bronze. The corners of his mouth were drooped; and a deep line was drawn down his forehead between his eyes; his eyes, almost black in colour, gazed out straight before him. He appeared to be completely oblivious to Graham’s presence, to everything save his own thoughts, and the latter began to wonder a little as to what was passing in his mind. And as he wondered a new world seemed to dawn upon his consciousness――a world where good and evil no longer stood so very far apart, were no longer so fixedly opposed to each other, so indissoluble as they had been, but were, rather, bound up together, inexplicably and hopelessly, almost defying disentanglement. A moment ago everything had been so clear, so plain before him; now, when he looked up, the sun was a little clouded over, and the whole colour and meaning of life stained with a darker hue. It seemed to him that he had been living in an atmosphere of dreamy idealism, the fruit of a plentiful lack of knowledge; and it did not occur to him that his ignorance had been beautiful, springing, as it did, not from stupidity, but from a peculiar type of mind, and an inexperience of life, of evil, even of sorrow. And a great compassion for the boy beside him welled up in his heart. ‘Do you think I tell you everything, then?’ Brocklehurst asked suddenly, a half-mocking smile hovering at the corners of his mouth, but in his voice just the faintest tremor. Graham kept his eyes carefully averted from him. ‘I think you would like to,’ he answered slowly. Brocklehurst shook his head. ‘No; I shouldn’t like to.’ ‘Well then, you――you can’t trust me very much.’