It was characteristic of Mr. Murray that he seemed to like any one of these books as well as another. From each and all of them he seemed to derive either amusement or information, or perhaps both. And then he was one of those rare readers who will read the same book contentedly five or six times over. If he happened to be wakeful in the night, he would light his candle and pick up the treatise on Steam Engines, if that happened to come first to his hand, and read himself quietly to sleep again over matter that he had probably, perused attentively only some three or four days before. He had not been at home more than five minutes to-day, when he heard a clatter of little feet on the stairs, and then came a knocking at his door, followed by a request that "Uncle Greaves" would go down into the garden and turn Alice's skipping-rope. So down he went, and turned the skipping-rope dutifully for half an hour. Then came a whisper from Frank, who was on thorns to know how the big kite was getting on, that Uncle Greaves had promised to make for him. It was getting on famously, he was told. "And will it really be as big as me?" asked Frank, eagerly. "Bigger--ever so much bigger," was the blissful answer. Then, with a troubled face, up came little Will. His waggon and horses had somehow come to grief; would Uncle Greaves try to mend them? Uncle Greaves would try to mend them, and would not only do that, but would give Dobbin a new coat of paint, and make an altogether superior animal of him. When the afternoon grew dusk and chilly, and tea-time was at hand, the children would not let their darling uncle go till they had kissed him all round; and little blue-eyed Kitty, out of sheer love, slipped her old sawdust doll into his tail-pocket, and so made him a present of her dearest worldly possession. "Take that card out of the window," said Mr. Van Duren, a few afternoons later, to his clerk, Pringle. "Rooms let at last?" asked Pringle. "Yes, at last." "To ancient deaf old party and young lady, I suppose," muttered Pringle to himself, as he removed the card from the window. "Make this dead-alive hole a bit more lively, maybe. It needs it bad enough." A strange thing happened to Max Van Duren that night. It was nearly midnight when he let himself in with his latch-key. His housekeeper had gone to bed long ago, and all was dark and silent. He lighted his bed-candle, and tramped slowly upstairs to his own room. He had put his candle on the dressing-table, and was proceeding to divest himself of his cravat, when, happening to glance into the large oval glass in front of which he was standing, he was startled to see there the reflection of another face beside his own. It was peering over his shoulder, and its eyes met his in the glass. Black and full of menace, or it might be of warning, were those eyes; and but for them, the face, with its thin line of black moustache, would have looked like that of a corpse, so death-like was its pallor.