saw you toiling at your obscure desk every day; and was quite content to be as little troubled as I might be, out of my own strip of duty, and to let everything about me go on, day by day, unquestioned, like a great machine—that was its habit and mine—and to take it all for granted, and consider it all right. My Wednesday nights came regularly round, our quartette parties came regularly off, my violoncello was in good tune, and there was nothing wrong in my world—or if anything not much—or little or much, it was no affair of mine."
"I can answer for your being more respected and beloved during all that time than anybody in the House, Sir," said John Carker.
"Pooh! Good-natured and easy enough, I dare say," returned the other, "a habit I had. It suited the Manager; it suited the man he managed: it suited me best of all. I did what was allotted to me to do, made no court to either of them, and was glad to occupy a station in which none was required. So I should have gone on till now, but that my room had a thin wall. You can tell your sister that it was divided from the Manager’s room by a wainscot partition."
"They were adjoining rooms; had been one, Perhaps, originally; and were separated, as Mr. Morfin says," said her brother, looking back to him for the resumption of his explanation.
"I have whistled, hummed tunes, gone accurately through the whole of Beethoven’s Sonata in B, to let him know that I was within hearing,’ said Mr. Morfin; "but he never heeded me. It happened seldom enough that I was within hearing of anything of a private nature, certainly. But when I was, and couldn’t otherwise avoid knowing something of it, I walked out. I walked out once, John, during a conversation between two brothers, to which, in the beginning, young Walter Gay was a party. But I overheard some of it before I left the room. You remember it sufficiently, perhaps, to tell your sister what its nature was?"
"It referred, Harriet," said her brother in a low voice, "to the past, and to our relative positions in the House."
"Its matter was not new to me, but was presented in a new aspect. It shook me in my habit—the habit of nine-tenths of the world—of believing that all was right about me, because I was used to it," said their visitor; "and induced me to recal the history of the two brothers, and to ponder on it. I think it was almost the first time in my life when I fell into this train of reflection—how will many things that are familiar, and quite matters of course to us now, look, when we come to see them from that new and distant point of view which we must all take up, one day or other? I was something less good-natured, as the phrase goes, after that morning, less easy and complacent altogether."
He sat for a minute or so, drumming with one hand on the table; and resumed in a hurry, as if he were anxious to get rid of his confession.
"Before I knew what to do, or whether I could do anything, there was a second conversation between the same two brothers, in which their sister was mentioned. I had no scruples of conscience in suffering all the waifs and strays of that conversation to float to me as freely as they would. I considered them mine by right. After that, I came here to see the sister for myself. The first time I stopped at the garden gate, I
