I will dwell no more upon the point. It is not the fashion of the Island Race to pre-judge a matter which is so soon to fall beneath a judge: Mr Justice Hopper, for many years a strong supporter in Parliament of the Water Companies and the National Party. * * * * * When Mr Burden had read Abbott’s shameful words, though he had not yet gathered all that they implied, and was rather stunned than wounded by them in the first moment, a look of age passed over his face: that look which was to return once or twice in the next few hours, and each time to mean that on his soul was blowing a sharp gust of death. He laid his left hand heavily upon the table, sighed, and picked up his remaining letters and opened them. One was a receipted bill from his wine merchant; the next a letter from his daughter, Mrs Legros, asking for money: the parish was a poor one, and they had to feed the lambs.... Clarence, moreover, was suffering from measles, and Billy needed a watch. The next was a circular from a company which desired to cover his floors, not with carpets, but with a kind of cheap linoleum; he frowned and threw it in the fire. The next was the reminder letter of summons to the meeting of the Board of Directors which was to be held in Broad Street, that afternoon, at four. Methodically he put the hour down on a piece of paper, folded it and slipped it into a waistcoat pocket; but his hand trembled as he did so, and the hour he put down was wrong. The next letter was an appeal for funds from a society for the Prevention of Evil, two more were about American quack medicines, and the last was an angry note from a local tradesman whose goods (so Mr Burden’s housekeeper constantly maintained) had neither been ordered nor received, and were therefore left unpaid for. When he had read all this, his correspondence, Mr Burden’s left hand stretched out again, his eyes not following it, and unsteadily took up Mr Abbott’s letter. He read it a second time. Its ridiculous language could touch no chord of humour, for all those chords were silent; nor of resentment, for the man was already broken. Cold senile tears gathered in his eyes; he put the letter down again, and gazed across his lonely table at the window and the grey London sky without. Then, at last, he rose with a determination in his heart. As he went through the hall and groped a little too long for his hat, his housekeeper, a woman who had been with him since his wife’s last illness, bade him not go out, telling him he was not fit to try even the summer air, still less attuned to business; but, by his expression and manner, it was evident that none of these things mattered to him at all. He was opening the door with the intention of walking directly to the station, when the bell rang, and he saw, upon the step without, a man whom he had known for many years: a Mr Hale.