"I have no notion: it is some months since I heard from him. He was then
at Malta, on his return from Asia Minor."

"So! you have never seen him since he bade you farewell at his old Manor-
house?"

"Never. He has not, I believe, been in England."

"Nor in Paris, where you seem to have chiefly resided."

"Nor in Paris. Ah, Vance, could I but be of some comfort to him. Now
that I am older, I think I understand in him much that perplexed me as a
boy when we parted. Darrell is one of those men who require a home.
Between the great world and solitude, he needs the intermediate filling-
up which the life domestic alone supplies: a wife to realize the sweet
word helpmate; children, with whose future he could knit his own toils
and his ancestral remembrances. That intermediate space annihilated,
the great world and the solitude are left, each frowning on the other."

"My dear Lionel, you must have lived with very clever people: you are
talking far above your years."

"Am I? True; I have lived, if not with very clever people, with people
far above my years. That is a secret I learned from Colonel Morley, to
whom I must present you,--the subtlest intellect under the quietest
manner. Once he said to me, 'Would you throughout life be up to the
height of your century,--always in the prime of man's reason, without
crudeness and without decline,--live habitually while young with persons
older, and when old with persons younger, than yourself.'"