Strength must be sought from a higher Power and a better Friend! At last the long-looked-for Monday arrived, and I went down to the station in the evening to meet Jack's train.
I could scarcely have said what feeling it was which prompted me to wear, not my new stripe suit, but my old clothes, shabby as they were, or why, instead of wearing my coloured Oxford-shirt, I preferred to array myself in one of the old flannel shirts with its time-honoured paper collar.
Somehow I had no ambition to "make an impression" on my friend Smith.
There was his head out of the window and his hand waving long before the train pulled up.

The face was the same I had always known, pale and solemn, with its big black eyes and clusters of black hair.

His illness had left neither mark nor change on him; still less had it altered his tone and manner, as he sprang from the carriage and seizing me by the arm, said, "Well, old fellow, here we are again, at last!" What a happy evening that was! We walked to Beadle Square, carrying Jack's bag between us, and talking all the way.

The dull old place appeared quite bright now he was back; and the meal we had together in the parlour that evening before the other fellows came home seemed positively sumptuous, although it consisted only of weak tea and bread- and-butter.
Then we turned out for a long walk, anywhere, and having no bag to catch hold of this time, we caught hold of one another's arms, which was quite as comfortable.
"Well, old man," began Jack, "what have you been up to all the time?
You never told me in your letters." "There wasn't much to tell," I said.

"It was awfully slow when you left, I can assure you." "But you soon got over that ?" said Jack, laughing.
He wasn't far wrong, as the reader knows, but somehow I would have preferred him to believe otherwise.