window is open, the fresh air seems shut out. There is no
fresh air nor current of life in this stifling place. There is a fire,
though it is not cold--a sofa near the fire--a sickening heavy smell of
abiding tobacco--not light whiffs of smoke, such as accompany a man's
labours, but a dead pall of idle heavy vapour; and in the midst of all a
man stretched lazily on the sofa, with his pipe laid on the table beside
him, and a book in his soft, boneless, nerveless hands. A large man,
interpenetrated with smoke and idleness and a certain dreary sodden
dissipation, heated yet unexcited, reading a novel he has read
half-a-dozen times before. He turns his bemused eyes to the door when
his invisible visitors enter. He fancies he hears some one coming, but
will not take the trouble to rise and see who is there--so, instead of
that exertion, he takes up his pipe, knocks the ashes out of it upon his
book, fills it with coarse tobacco, and stretches his long arm over the
shoulder of the sofa for a light. His feet are in slippers, his person
clothed in a greasy old coat, his linen soiled and untidy. That is the
skeleton in young Rider's house.

The servants, you may be sure, knew all about this unwelcome visitor.
They went with bottles and jugs secretly to bring him what he wanted;
they went to the circulating library for him; they let him in when he
had been out in the twilight all shabby and slovenly. They would not be
human if they did not talk about him. They say he is very good-natured,
poor gentleman--always has a pleasant word--is nobody's enemy but his
own; and to see how "the doctor do look at him, and he his own brother
as was brought up with him," is dreadful, to be sure.

All this young Rider takes silently, never saying a word about it to any
human creature. He seems to know by intuition what all these people say
of him, as he drives about furiously in his drag from patient to patient;
and wherever he goes, as plain, nay, far more distinctly than the
actual prospect before him, he sees that sofa, that dusty slow-burning
fire--that pipe, with the little heap of ashes knocked out of it upon
the table--that wasted ruined life chafing him to desperation with its
dismal content. It is very true that it would have been sadly imprudent
of the young man to go to the little house in Grove Street a year ago,
and tell Bessie Christian he was very fond of her, and that somehow for
her love he would manage to provide for those old