regulate the pace. His name was Abel, and all his life he had been
known as able Abe;--a silent, far-seeing, close-fisted, just old man,
who was not, however, by any means deficient in sympathy either with
the sufferings or with the joys of humanity.

It was Easter time and the courts were not sitting, but Mr. Wharton
was in his chamber as a matter of course at ten o'clock. He knew no
real homely comforts elsewhere,--unless at the whist-table at the
Eldon. He ate and drank and slept in his own house in Manchester
Square, but he could hardly be said to live there. It was not
there that his mind was awake, and that the powers of the man were
exercised. When he came up from the dining-room to join his daughter
after dinner he would get her to sing him a song, and would then seat
himself with a book. But he never read in his own house, invariably
falling into a sweet and placid slumber, from which he was never
disturbed till his daughter kissed him as she went to bed. Then
he would walk about the room, and look at his watch, and shuffle
uneasily through half-an-hour till his conscience allowed him to take
himself to his chamber. He was a man of no pursuits in his own house.
But from ten in the morning till five, or often till six, in the
evening, his mind was active in some work. It was not now all law,
as it used to be. In the drawer of the old piece of furniture which
stood just at the right hand of his own arm-chair there were various
books hidden away, which he was sometimes ashamed to have seen by
his clients,--poetry and novels and even fairy tales. For there was
nothing Mr. Wharton could not read in his chambers, though there was
nothing that he could read in his own house. He had a large pleasant
room in which to sit, looking out from the ground floor of Stone
Buildings on to the gardens belonging to the Inn,--and here, in the
centre of the metropolis, but in perfect quiet as far as the outside
world was concerned, he had lived and still lived his life.

At about noon on the day following that on which Lopez had made his
sudden swoop on Mr. Parker and had then dined with Everett Wharton,
he called at Stone Buildings and was shown into the lawyer's room.
His quick eye at once discovered the book which Mr. Wharton half
hid away, and saw upon it Mr. Mudie's suspicious ticket. Barristers
certainly never get their law books from Mudie, and Lopez at once
knew that his hoped-for father-in-law had been reading a novel. He