ything in the house was kept exactly as it
came to us, for him to see and approve. Even now, nothing is changed
but our own room below-stairs that you have just left. When the son came
home for the last time in his life, and for the last time in his life
saw his father, it was most likely in this room that they met.'

As the Secretary looked all round it, his eyes rested on a side door in
a corner.

'Another staircase,' said Mr Boffin, unlocking the door, 'leading down
into the yard. We'll go down this way, as you may like to see the yard,
and it's all in the road. When the son was a little child, it was up
and down these stairs that he mostly came and went to his father. He was
very timid of his father. I've seen him sit on these stairs, in his
shy way, poor child, many a time. Mr and Mrs Boffin have comforted him,
sitting with his little book on these stairs, often.'

'Ah! And his poor sister too,' said Mrs Boffin. 'And here's the sunny
place on the white wall where they one day measured one another. Their
own little hands wrote up their names here, only with a pencil; but the
names are here still, and the poor dears gone for ever.'

'We must take care of the names, old lady,' said Mr Boffin. 'We must
take care of the names. They shan't be rubbed out in our time, nor yet,
if we can help it, in the time after us. Poor little children!'

'Ah, poor little children!' said Mrs Boffin.

They had opened the door at the bottom of the staircase giving on the
yard, and they stood in the sunlight, looking at the scrawl of the two
unsteady childish hands two or three steps up the staircase. There was
something in this simple memento of a blighted childhood, and in the
tenderness of Mrs Boffin, that touched the Secretary.

Mr Boffin then showed his new man of business the Mounds, and his own
particular Mound which had been left him as his legacy under the will
before he acquired the whole estate.

'It would have been enough for us,' said Mr Boffin, 'in case it had
pleased God to spare the last of those two young lives and sorrowful
deaths. We didn't want the rest.'

At the treasures of the yard, and at the outside of the house, and at
the detached building which Mr Boffin pointed out as the residence
of himself and his wife during the many years of their service, the
Secretary looked with interest. It was not until Mr Boffin had shown
him every wonder of the Bower twice over, that he remembered his having
duties to disch