that these three small groups of people would have remained hardly
conscious of each other's existence, and that there would have been no
opportunity for that action and reaction which is here set forth. But
there was a common link to bind them together. To single himself out
from all other Norwood builders the landlord had devised and laid out a
common lawn tennis ground, which stretched behind the houses with taut-
stretched net, green close-cropped sward, and widespread whitewashed
lines. Hither in search of that hard exercise which is as necessary as
air or food to the English temperament, came young Hay Denver when
released from the toil of the City; hither, too, came Dr. Walker and his
two fair daughters, Clara and Ida, and hither also, champions of the
lawn, came the short-skirted, muscular widow and her athletic nephew.
Ere the summer was gone they knew each other in this quiet nook as they
might not have done after years of a stiffer and more formal
acquaintance.

And especially to the Admiral and the Doctor were this closer intimacy
and companionship of value. Each had a void in his life, as every man
must have who with unexhausted strength steps out of the great race, but
each by his society might help to fill up that of his neighbor. It is
true that they had not much in common, but that is sometimes an aid
rather than a bar to friendship. Each had been an enthusiast in his
profession, and had retained all his interest in it. The Doctor still
read from cover to cover his Lancet and his Medical Journal, attended
all professional gatherings, worked himself into an alternate state of
exaltation and depression over the results of the election of officers,
and reserved for himself a den of his own, in which before rows of
little round bottles full of glycerine, Canadian balsam, and staining
agents, he still cut sections with a microtome, and peeped through his
long, brass, old-fashioned microscope at the arcana of nature. With his