Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/54

44 in all probability have become interested in the subjects that drew him into friendship with the Comte d'Etranges. In a most impressionable moment, not long after his eldest brother's death, and when he was burdened with too many empty days, he made a friendship which had a singular effect upon him. His parents had persuaded him to leave the Navy, yet in practical matters he was not really needed in his own home. He could not leave his parents in their time of sorrow, and his only sister's marriage soon made them lean on him the more. He determined to study hard to make up for what he had lost during his life at sea, although even then he had always managed to read a good deal. He had a turn for science, which was the immediate occasion of his making friends with Professor Telles, a young man of already European reputation. This friendship became the chief interest of his life. When Telles married the friendship only deepened. It was an ideal marriage; both were young, handsome, with great gifts, unworldly, loving work and loving each other in an absolute union. "They had," Mr. Sutcliffe said afterwards, "the riches of nature showered on them,—were her complete children. They were pagans, not in the sense of worshipping idols, but in their entire ignoring of a supernatural world. There was no apostate touch about them; they did not dislike religion; they had never been brought across it, and they did not trouble their heads about it."

After three years of married life, while travelling with Mr. Sutcliffe in the North of Spain, Professor Telles died of diphtheria after three days' illness, in agonies of pain. Nature in the end seemed brutal to her spoilt child. No one, I think, has ever known what Mr. Sutcliffe saw, and suffered by seeing, while he was the only companion of Mrs. Telles. It was the end of his youth.

When he came home his mother was startled and alarmed. His brother's death had made no such mark on him. The