After Class Day and Commencement the class scattered forever. In September, when I returned to New York and settled down to my profession, I found my friend at the Columbia Law School. His father had died during the summer, leaving nothing but a life-insurance policy, on the income of which the mother and son could live modestly until he could get into a law office and begin to make his way in the world. They had taken a floor in a little boarding-house in a side street, and they were very comfortable; their money had been invested for them by one of his father's business associates, who had so arranged matters that their income was much larger than they had expected. In this modest home he and his mother lived happily. I guessed that the father had been hard and unbending, and that my friend and his mother had been drawn closer together. Of a certainty I never saw a man more devoted than he was to her, or more tender, and she was worthy of the affection he lavished on her. In those days the Law School course extended over two years only, and it did not call for very hard work on the part of the student, so he was free to pass frequent evenings in my library. I used to go and see him often, for I liked his mother, and I liked to see them sitting side by side, he holding her hand often as he debated vehemently with me the insoluble questions which interested us then. During the second winter I sometimes saw there a brown-eyed girl of perhaps twenty, pretty enough, but with a sharp, nervous manner I did not care for. This was the daughter of the lady who kept the boarding-house; and my friend was polite to her, as he was to all women; he was attentive even, as a young man is wont to be toward a quick-witted girl. But nothing in the manner led me to suppose that he was interested in her more than in any other woman. I did not like her myself, for she struck me as sharp-tongued. It is true that I saw less of my friend that second winter, being hard at work myself. It was in the spring, two years after our graduation, that I received a letter from him announcing his engagement to the young lady I had seen him with, his landlady's daughter. My first thought, I remember, was to wonder how his mother would feel at the prospect of another woman's coming between them. His letter was a long dithyramb, and it declared that never had there been a man so happy, and that great as was his present joy, it was as nothing compared with the delight in store for him. He wrote me that each had loved the other from the first, and each had thought the other did not care, until at last he could bear it no longer; so he had asked her, and got his answer. "You cannot know," he wrote, "what this is to me. It is my life--it is the making of my life; and if I should die to-night, I should not have lived in vain, for I have tasted joy, and death cannot rob me of that."