The room which Vaughan saw before him was stately and spacious, and furnished with quiet richness. A deep silence, intensified by the fact that the room had no windows, but was lighted from above, reigned in it—and a smell of law-calf. Here and there on a bookcase or a pedestal stood a marble bust of Bacon, of Selden, of Blackstone. And for a moment Vaughan fancied that these were its only occupants. On advancing further, however, he discovered two persons, who were writing busily at separate side-tables; and one of them looked up and spoke. “Your pardon, Mr. Vaughan!” he said. “One moment, if you please!” He was almost as good as his word, for less than a minute later he threw down the pen, and rose—a gaunt figure in a black frockcoat, and with a black stock about his scraggy neck—and came to meet his visitor. “I fear that I have come at an untimely moment, my lord,” Vaughan said, a little awed in spite of himself by what he knew of the man. But the other’s frank address put him at once at his ease. “Politics pass, Mr. Vaughan,” the Chancellor answered lightly, “but science remains.” He did not explain, as he pointed to a seat, that he loved, above all things, to produce startling effects; to dazzle by the ease with which he flung off one part and assumed another. Henry Brougham—so, for some time after his elevation to the peerage, he persisted in signing himself—was at this time at the zenith of his life, as of his fame. Tall, but lean and ungainly, with a long neck and sloping shoulders, he had one of the strangest faces which genius has ever worn. His clownish features, his high cheek-bones, and queer bulbous nose are familiar to us; for, something exaggerated by the caricaturist, they form week by week the trailing mask which mars the cover of “Punch.” Yet was the face, with all its ugliness, singularly mobile; and the eyes, the windows of that restless and insatiable soul, shone, sparkled, laughed, wept, with incredible brilliance. That which he did not know, that which his mind could not perform—save sit still and be discreet—no man had ever discovered. And it was the knowledge of this, the sense of the strange and almost uncanny versatility of the man, which for a moment overpowered Vaughan. The Chancellor seated himself opposite his visitor, and placed a hand on each of his wide-spread knees. He smiled. “My friend,” he said, “I envy you.” Vaughan coloured shyly. “Your lordship has little cause,” he answered. “Great cause,” was the reply, “great cause! For as you are I was—and,” he chuckled, as he rocked himself to and fro, “I have not found life very empty or very unpleasant. But it was not to tell you this that I asked you to wait on me, Mr. Vaughan, as you may suppose. Light! It is a singular thing that you at the outset of your career—even as I thirty years ago at the same point of mine—should take up such a parergon, and alight upon the same discovery.” “I do not think I understand.”