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 daresay,'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 recall 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 brothe