before met him face to face. He felt as a blind man might feel if, after
living all his life in closest intimacy with someone, he were suddenly
to receive his sight and, for the first time, actually look upon his
companion's face.

In the years that have passed since that day the Doctor has learned that
the lad was to him, not so much a mystery as a revelation--the revelation
of an unspoken ideal, of a truth that he had always known but never fully
confessed even to himself, and that lies at last too deeply buried
beneath the accumulated rubbish of his life to be of any use to him or to
others. In the boy he met this hidden, secret, unacknowledged part of
himself, that he knows to be the truest, most precious and most sacred
part, and that he has always persistently ignored even while always
conscious that he can no more escape it than he can escape his own life.
In short, Dan Matthews is to the Doctor that which the old man feels he
ought to have been; that which he might have been, but never now can be.

It was still early in the forenoon of the following day when the Doctor
heard a cheery hail, and the boy came riding out of the brush of the
little ravine to meet his friend who was waiting on the river bank. As
the lad sprang lightly to the ground, and, with quick fingers, took some
things from the saddle, loosed the girths and removed the pony's bridle,
the physician watched him with a slight feeling of--was it envy or
regret? "You are early," he said.

The boy laughed. "I would have come earlier if I could," Then, dismissing
the little horse, he turned eagerly, "Have you been there yet--to that
place up the river?"

"Indeed I have not," said the Doctor, "I have been waiting for you to