He shook him warmly by the hand, and said, “Oh, Arden--ah, Earnshaw,” looking at the card. “I beg your pardon. I am delighted to see you.” And then they both sat down and looked at each other after the warmth of this accost, and found, as so often happens, that they had nothing more to say. I do not know a more embarrassing position in ordinary circumstances, even when there is no additional and complicating embarrassment. You meet your old friend, you shake hands, you commit yourself to an expression of delight--and then you are silent. He has sailed away from you and you from him since you last met, and there is nothing to be said between you, beyond that first unguarded and uncalled for warmth of salutation, the emblem of an intimacy past. This is how Lord Newmarch accosted Edgar; and Edgar accepted the salutation with a momentary glow at his breast. And then they sat down and looked at each other; they had given forth all the feeling they had toward each other, and how could they express sentiments which had no existence? They had to glide involuntarily into small talk about the empty state of town, and the new Minister’s devotion to business, and the question between Prussia and Russia which he had to keep at his post to watch. Lord Newmarch allowed, with dignified resignation, that it was hard upon him, and that an Under Secretary of State has much that is disagreeable to bear; and then he added politely, but thinking to himself--oh, how much easier were two, nay half-a-dozen working-men, than this!--an inquiry as to the nature of his old friend’s occupation. “What,” said the statesman, crossing and uncrossing his legs two or three times in succession to get the easiest position, and with a look at his shoes which expressed eloquently all the many events that had passed since their last meeting, “What are you doing yourself?” CHAPTER X. A Noble Patron.