CHAPTER TWENTY ONE.
HOW A DOOR CLOSED BETWEEN MY FRIEND SMITH AND ME.
If any one had told me a month before that I should quarrel with my friend Smith, I should have laughed at the bare idea.

But now the impossible thing had happened.
That night as I lay awake in my bed I felt that I had not a friend in the world.

I had wounded, in the cruellest way, the only true friend I ever had, and now I was to suffer for it.

The words had come hastily and thoughtlessly, but they had come; and Jack, I knew, regarded me as a coward and a brute.
The next day we scarcely spoke a word to one another, and when we did it was in so constrained a manner that it would have been more comfortable had we remained silent.

We walked to and from the office by separate ways, and during the mid-day half-hour we lunched for the first time at different eating-houses.
I longed to explain--to beg his pardon.