t I don't mean,' said Jeremiah,
sticking to his figurative expression with tenacious and impenetrable
obstinacy: 'I mean dropped down upon me.'

'I remonstrated with you,' she began again, 'because--'

'I won't have it!' cried Jeremiah. 'You dropped down upon me.'

'I dropped down upon you, then, you ill-conditioned man,' (Jeremiah
chuckled at having forced her to adopt his phrase,) 'for having been
needlessly significant to Arthur that morning. I have a right to
complain of it as almost a breach of confidence. You did not mean it--'

'I won't have it!' interposed the contradictory Jeremiah, flinging back
the concession. 'I did mean it.'

'I suppose I must leave you to speak in soliloquy if you choose,' she
replied, after a pause that seemed an angry one. 'It is useless my
addressing myself to a rash and headstrong old man who has a set purpose
not to hear me.'

'Now, I won't take that from you either,' said Jeremiah. 'I have no such
purpose. I have told you I did mean it. Do you wish to know why I meant
it, you rash and headstrong old woman?'

'After all, you only restore me my own words,' she said, struggling with
her indignation. 'Yes.'

'This is why, then. Because you hadn't cleared his father to him, and
you ought to have done it. Because, before you went into any tantrum
about yourself, who are--'

'Hold there, Flintwinch!' she cried out in a changed voice: 'you may go
a word too far.'

The old man seemed to think so. There was another pause, and he had
altered his position in the room, when he spoke again more mildly:

'I was going to tell you why it was. Because, before you took your own
part, I thought you ought to have taken the part of Arthur's father.
Arthur's father! I had no particular love for Arthur's father. I served
Arthur's father's uncle, in this house, when Arthur's father was not
much above me--was poorer as far as his pocket went--and when his uncle
might as soon have left me his heir as have left him. He starved in the
parlour, and I starved in the kitchen; that was the principal difference
in our positions; there was not much more than a flight of breakneck
stairs between us. I never took to him in those times; I don't know that
I ever took to him greatly at any time. He was an undecided, irresolute
chap, who had everything but his orphan life scared out of him when he
was young. And when he brought you home here, the wife his uncle
had named for him, I didn't need to look at you tw