After all, there is nothing like the tenacity of boyish friendship, is there?
I suppose that, to Sir Roger, father is still the manly, debonair youth that he remembers thirty years ago.

In happy ignorance he slurs over the thirty intervening years of moroseness, and goes back to that blest epoch in which I have so much difficulty in believing, and about which he, walking beside me now and again through the tender, springing grass of the meadows, has told me many a tale.

For our promised walk has come off, and so has many others like it.
He _must_ be dotingly fond of father.

It is the 15th of April.

I dare say, O reader, that it seems to you much like any other date, but to me, through every back-coming year, it seems to gain fresh significance--the date that marks the most important day--take it for all in all--of my life, though, whether for good or ill, who shall say, until I am dead, and my life's sum reckoned up.