useless and dull. Neither of us counted the days, nor looked
backwards or forwards.

One June morning I woke to the consciousness that I was twenty years
old, and that John Halifax was--a man: the difference between us
being precisely as I have expressed it.

Our birthdays fell within a week of each other, and it was in
remembering his--the one which advanced him to the dignity of
eighteen--that I called to mind my own. I say, "advanced him to the
dignity"--but in truth that is an idle speech; for any dignity which
the maturity of eighteen may be supposed to confer he had already in
possession. Manhood had come to him, both in character and
demeanour, not as it comes to most young lads, an eagerly-desired and
presumptuously-asserted claim, but as a rightful inheritance, to be
received humbly, and worn simply and naturally. So naturally, that I
never seemed to think of him as anything but a boy, until this one
June Sunday, when, as before stated, I myself became twenty years
old.

I was talking over that last fact, in a rather dreamy mood, as he and
I sat in our long-familiar summer seat, the clematis arbour by the
garden wall.

"It seems very strange, John, but so it is--I am actually twenty."

"Well, and what of that?"

I sat looking down into the river, which flowed on, as my years were
flowing, monotonous, dark, and slow,--as they must flow on for ever.