The altar fire by A.C. Benson

Our route lay through Cambridge; we had to change there and wait; so we drove down to the town to look at my old college. There it lay, the charming, pretty, quiet place, blinking lazily out of its deep-set barred windows in the bright sun, just the same, it seemed, as ever, though perhaps a touch more mellow and more settled; every corner and staircase haunted with old ghosts for me. I could put a name to every set of rooms, flash an incident to every door and window. In my heavy, apathetic mood the memory of my life there seemed like a memory of some one else, moving in golden light, talking and laughing in firelit rooms, lingering in moonlit nights by the bridge, wondering what life was going to bring. It seemed like turning the pages of some old illuminated book with bright pictures, where the very sunlight is the purest and stiffest gold. The men I knew, the friends I lived with, admired, loved -- where are they?

scattered to all parts of the earth, parted utterly from me, some of them dead, alas! and silent. It came over me with a thrill of sharpest pain to think how I had pictured Alec here, living the same free and beautiful life, tasting the same innocent pleasures, with the bright, sweet world opening upon him. In that calm, sunny afternoon, life seemed a strange phantasmal business, and I myself a revenant from some thin, unsubstantial world.