“Your study must have been deeply interesting to you, or you could scarcely have been so unconscious of my footsteps. Permit me.” He took the volume from the young man’s hand and turned the leaves listlessly. “One of your favourite dialogues, I suppose? No; an English novel. _Dion! Dion?_ I have some recollection of a book called _Dion_. What a very shabby person he looks after the lapse of years! Really, the authors of that time suffered some disadvantage at the hands of their publishers. What dismal gray binding! what meagre-looking type! The very paper has a musty odour. And you are deeply interested in _Dion_?” “Yes; I am deeply interested.” “The book strikes you as powerful?” “No. The writer strikes me as a consummate scoundrel.” Mr. Jerningham smiled, a faint smile. His smiles were for the most part faint and wan, like the smiles of a wandering spirit in the house of Hades. “Do not be so energetic in your denunciation, Mr. Thorburn,” he said, quietly. “The man who wrote _Dion_ was as other men of his time--just a little selfish, perhaps, and anxious to travel on the sunny side of the great highway.” “Did you know him?” asked Eustace, with sudden eagerness. “Not the least in the world. But I know his book. People talked of it a little at the time, and there was some discussion about the authorship; all kinds of improbable persons were suggested. Yes; it all comes back to me as I look at the pages. A very poor book; stilted, affected, coxcombical. What a fool the man must have been to print such a piece of egotism!” “Yes. It seems strange that any man could publish a book for the purpose of proclaiming himself a villain.” “Not at all. But it is strange that a man can give his villany to the world in a _poor_ book--a book not containing one element of literary success; and that he should take the trouble of writing all this. Yes, it is very strange. An indolent kind of man, too--as one would imagine from the book. A very feeble book! I see a wrong tense here in a Latin quotation. The man did not even know his Catullus. Thanks.” Mr. Jerningham returned the volume with a graceful listlessness and with a half-regretful sigh, as if it wearied him even to remember so feeble a book. He strolled away, leaving Eustace wondering that he should have fallen across a man who was familiar with his father’s book, and who in person resembled his father. “If Mr. Jerningham had written his own biography, it might have been something like this book,” he said to himself. And then another IF--stupendous, terrible--presented itself to his mind. But this he dismissed as an absurd and groundless fancy. “What accident is more common than such a likeness as that between us two?” he asked of himself. “The world is full of such half-resemblances, to say nothing of the Lesurges and Debosques who are guillotined in mistake for one another.”