musing--musing upon that one sweet dream of his new existence, of course.
From whatever point his thoughts started, they always drifted into that
channel.

While he was sitting like this, with his hands in his pockets and his
chair tilted upon its hind legs, the half-glass door opened, and a
gentleman came into the office--a man a little over middle height,
broad-shouldered, and powerfully built, with a naturally dark complexion,
which had been tanned still darker by sun and wind, black eyes and heavy
black eyebrows, a head a little bald at the top, and a face that might
have been called almost ugly but for the look of intellectual power in
the broad open forehead and the perfect modelling of the flexible
sensitive mouth; a remarkable face altogether, not easily to be forgotten
by those who had once looked upon it.

This man was John Saltram, the one intimate and chosen friend of Gilbert
Fenton's youth and manhood. They had met first at Oxford, and had seldom
lost sight of each other since the old university days. They had
travelled a good deal together during the one idle year that had preceded
Gilbert's sudden plunge into commerce. They had been up the Nile together
in the course of these wanderings; and here, remote from all civilized
aid, Gilbert had fallen ill of a fever--a long tedious business which
brought him to the very point of death, and throughout which John Saltram
had nursed him with a womanly tenderness and devotion that knew no
abatement. If this had been wanting to strengthen the tie between
them--which it was not--it would have brought them closer together. As it
was, that dreary time of sickness and peril was only a memory which
Gilbert Fenton kept in his heart of hearts, never to grow less sacred to
him until the end of life.