SCHOOL DAYS
become personal to themselves. In fact, the two had shrunk from personal religious discussion, not knowing how it might end, and fearful of risking a friendship very dear to both, and which they felt, somehow, without quite knowing why, would never be the same, but either tenfold stronger or sapped at its foundation, after such a communing together.
What a bother all this explaining is! I wish we could get on without it. But we can't. However, you'll all find, if you haven't found it out already, that a time comes in every human friendship when you must go down into the depths of yourself and lay bare what is there to your friend, and wait in fear for his answer. A few moments may do it; and it may be (most likely will be, as you are English boys) that you never do it but once. But done it must be, if the friendship is to be worth the name. You must find what is there, at the very root and bottom of one another's hearts; and if you are at once there, nothing on earth can, or at least ought to, sunder you.
East had remained lying down until Tom finished speaking, as if fearing to interrupt him; he now sat up at the table, and leaned his head on one hand, taking up a pencil with the other and working little holes with it in the table-cover. After a bit he looked up, stopped the pencil, and said: "Thank you very much, old fellow; there's no other boy in the house would have done it for me but you or Arthur. I can see well enough," he went on after a pause, "all the best big fellows look on me with suspicion; they think I'm a devil-may-care, reckless young scamp. So I am—eleven hours out of twelve—but not the twelfth. Then all of our contemporaries worth knowing follow suit, of course; we're very good friends at games and all that, but not a soul of them but you and Arthur ever tried to break through the crust and see whether there was anything at the bottom of me; and then the bad ones I won't stand, and they know that."
"Don't you think that's half fancy, Harry?"
"Not a bit of it," said East, bitterly, pegging away with his
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