The good opinion of Bartley's smartness which Squire Gaylord had formed was confirmed some months later by the development of the fact that the young man did not regard his management of the Equity Free Press as a final vocation. The story went that he lounged into the lawyer's office one Saturday afternoon in October, and asked him to let him take his Blackstone into the woods with him. He came back with it a few hours later. “Well, sir,” said the attorney, sardonically, “how much Blackstone have you read?” “About forty pages,” answered the young man, dropping into one of the empty chairs, and hanging his leg over the arm. The lawyer smiled, and, opening the book, asked half a dozen questions at random. Bartley answered without changing his indifferent countenance, or the careless posture he had fallen into. A sharper and longer examination followed; the very language seemed to have been unbrokenly transferred to his mind, and he often gave the author's words as well as his ideas. “Ever looked at this before?” asked the lawyer, with a keen glance at him over his spectacles. “No,” said Bartley, gaping as if bored, and further relieving his weariness by stretching. He was without deference for any presence; and the old lawyer did not dislike him for this: he had no deference himself. “You think of studying law?” he asked, after a pause. “That's what I came to ask you about,” said Bartley, swinging his leg. The elder recurred to his book, and put some more questions. Then he said, “Do you want to study with me?” “That's about the size of it.” He shut the book, and pushed it on the table toward the young man. “Go ahead. You'll get along--if you don't get along too easily.” It was in the spring after this that Marcia returned home from her last term at boarding-school, and first saw him. III. Bartley woke on Sunday morning with the regrets that a supper of mince-pie and toasted cheese is apt to bring. He woke from a bad dream, and found that he had a dull headache. A cup of coffee relieved his pain, but it left him listless, and with a longing for sympathy which he experienced in any mental or physical discomfort. The frankness with which he then appealed for compassion was one of the things that made people like him; he flung himself upon the pity of the first he met. It might be some one to whom he had said a cutting or mortifying thing at their last encounter, but Bartley did not mind that; what he desired was commiseration, and he confidingly ignored the past in a trust that had rarely been abused. If his sarcasm proved that he was quick and smart, his recourse to those who had suffered from it proved that he did not mean anything by what he said; it showed that he was a man of warm feelings, and that his heart was in the right place.