Nettles

For, though seven years be a mere breath in the memories of the old, it is
a long transfiguration to him whose first youth is passing, and who finds
unsolicited additions accruing to some parts of his being and strange
deprivations in others, and upon whom the unhappy realization begins to be
borne in, that his is no particular case, and that he of all the world is
not to be spared, but, like his forbears, must inevitably wriggle in the
disguising crucible of time. And, though men accept it with apparently
patient humor, the first realization that people do grow old, and that
they do it before they have had time to be young, is apt to come like a
shock.

Perhaps not even in the interminable months of Carlow had Harkless
realized the length of seven years so keenly as he did when he beheld his
old friend at his bedside. How men may be warped apart in seven years,
especially in the seven years between twenty-three and thirty! At the
latter age you may return to the inseparable of seven years before and
speak not the same language; you find no heartiness to carry on with each
other after half an hour. Not so these classmates, who had known each
other to the bone.

Ah, yes, it was Tom Meredith, the same lad, in spite of his masquerade of
flesh; and Helen was right: Tom had not forgotten.

"It's the old horse-thief!" John murmured, tremulously.

"You go plumb to thunder," answered Meredith between gulps.