“Then tell her I will come about one o’clock,” said Mr. Brownlow; and he returned to his papers. But this was only a pretense. He would not let even such a despicable adversary as old Nancy see that the news disturbed him. He went on with his papers, pretending to read them, but he did not know what he was reading. Till one o’clock! It was but ten o’clock then. No doubt it might be some of her foolish complaints, some of the grievances she was constantly accumulating; or, on the other hand, it might be--Mr. Brownlow drew his curtain aside for a minute, and he saw that young Powys was sitting at his usual desk. The young man had fallen back again into the cloud from which he had seemed to be delivered at the time of his visit to Brownlows. He was not working at that moment; he was leaning his head on his hand, and gazing with a very downcast look at some minute characters on a bit of paper before him--calculations of some kind it seemed. Looking at him, Mr. Brownlow saw that he began to look shabby--white at the elbows, as well as clouded and heavy over the eyes. He drew back the curtain again and returned to his place, but with his mind too much agitated even for a pretense at work. Had the old woman’s message any thing to do with this youth? Had his calculations which he was attending to when he ought to have been doing his work any connection with Mrs. Fennell’s sudden summons? Mr. Brownlow was like a man surrounded by ghosts, and he did not know from what quarter or in what shape they might next assail him. But he had so far lost his self-command that he could not wait and fight with his assailants till the hour he mentioned. He took up his hat at last, hurriedly, and called to Mr. Wrinkell to say that he was going out. “I shall be back in half an hour,” Mr. Brownlow said. The head-clerk stood by and watched his employer go out, and shook his head. “He’ll retire before long,” Mr. Wrinkell said to himself. “You’ll see he will; and I would not give a sixpence for the business after he is gone.” But Mr. Brownlow was not aware of this thought. He was thinking nothing about the business. He was asking himself whether it was the compound interest that young Powys was calculating, and what Mrs. Fennell knew about it. All his spectres, after a moment of ineffectual repression, were bursting forth again.