And, turning on his face, he rested his chin on his hands, and
stared at the short grass where the little blue milkwort was growing....
I
And this is what he remembered.
On the first of May, after their last year together at college, Frank
Ashurst and his friend Robert Garton were on a tramp. They had walked
that day from Brent, intending to make Chagford, but Ashurst's football
knee had given out, and according to their map they had still some seven
miles to go. They were sitting on a bank beside the-road, where a track
crossed alongside a wood, resting the knee and talking of the universe,
as young men will. Both were over six feet, and thin as rails; Ashurst
pale, idealistic, full of absence; Garton queer, round-the-corner,
knotted, curly, like some primeval beast. Both had a literary bent;
neither wore a hat.
Ashurst's hair was smooth, pale, wavy, and had a way of rising on either
side of his brow, as if always being flung back; Carton's was a kind of
dark unfathomed mop. They had not met a soul for miles.
"My dear fellow," Garton was saying, "pity's only an effect of
self-consciousness; it's a disease of the last five thousand years.
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