I was wishing to be alone for an
hour or two; but I shall know where to find you, at any rate.
Good-bye.'
Chapter XXXVIII
'Jealousy is cruel as the grave.'
Stephen pondered not a little on this meeting with his old friend
and once-beloved exemplar. He was grieved, for amid all the
distractions of his latter years a still small voice of fidelity
to Knight had lingered on in him. Perhaps this staunchness was
because Knight ever treated him as a mere disciple--even to
snubbing him sometimes; and had at last, though unwittingly,
inflicted upon him the greatest snub of all, that of taking away
his sweetheart. The emotional side of his constitution was built
rather after a feminine than a male model; and that tremendous
wound from Knight's hand may have tended to keep alive a warmth
which solicitousness would have extinguished altogether.
Knight, on his part, was vexed, after they had parted, that he had
not taken Stephen in hand a little after the old manner. Those
words which Smith had let fall concerning somebody having a prior
claim to Elfride, would, if uttered when the man was younger, have
provoked such a query as, 'Come, tell me all about it, my lad,'
from Knight, and Stephen would straightway have delivered himself
of all he knew on the subject.
Stephen the ingenuous boy, though now obliterated externally by
Stephen the contriving man, returned to Knight's memory vividly
that afternoon.
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