explain why he never wrote to anybody and why nobody ever wrote to him.
Had the man committed some terrible crime, and fled to the army to hide
his guilt? Blakely suggested that he must have murdered "the old folks."
What did he mean by eternally conning that tattered Latin grammar? And
was his name Bladburn, anyhow? Even his imperturbable amiability became
suspicious. And then his frightful reticence! If he was the victim of
any deep grief or crushing calamity, why didn't he seem unhappy? What
business had he to be cheerful?

"It's my opinion," said Strong, "that he's a rival Wandering Jew; the
original Jacobs, you know, was a dark fellow."

Blakely inferred from something Bladburn had said, or something he had
not said,--which was more likely,--that he had been a schoolmaster at
some period of his life.

"Schoolmaster be hanged!" was Strong's comment. "Can you fancy a
schoolmaster going about conjugating baby verbs out of a dratted little
spelling-book? No, Quite So has evidently been a--a--Blest if I can
imagine _what_ he's been!"

Whatever John Bladburn had been, he was a lonely man. Whenever I want a
type of perfect human isolation, I shall think of him, as he was in
those days, moving remote, self-contained, and alone in the midst of two
hundred thousand men.


II

The Indian summer, with its infinite beauty and tenderness, came like a