opposite side of the hearth, stirring the ashes and shooting furtive glances from time to time at his brother, said, “There came for you a message while you were away, from Mr. Warrener, to know would you go up to the Manor House to-morrow, to fix shelves for his books. William Baskett came with the message, and says, Mr. Warrener is impatient, and though the books have been stacked up on the floor for over a year, must needs have the shelves ready to-morrow now that he had at last taken the idea into his head.” “I cannot go,” said Lovel moodily. He gave no reason. He thought that the effort was being made unnecessarily hard for him by this chance intervention. True, he might not set eyes on Clare, but even so the Manor House would be so redolent of her as to trouble him to the soul. She might be absent; but, again, she might come into the room and stand over him while he sawed and planed, chattering to him in her fashion, at once grave and light-hearted. “I cannot go,” he said, afraid for himself. Olver shuffled across the hearth and knelt at his brother’s feet, looking up into his face. “There is a weight on your mind, brother. Oh, yes, no use in shaking your head: I always know. Won’t you tell Olver? You don’t know what powers I might have to help you,--no, no, nothing that you disapprove of,” he added hastily, seeing Lovel’s face darken, “but you know, you often say I’ve a kink of wisdom, and so I have,” he went on, carried away, as he readily was, by his vanity. “Only you cannot appreciate it, brother, or you would trust me more.” Lovel would have given much to be left in peace just then in order to pursue his quarrel with his own heart, but he was incapable of slighting his brother’s demonstrations of affection, so he put his hand on the head pressed against his knee, and, without speaking, caressed the curls in a manner he hoped was not too obviously perfunctory. He felt Olver’s instant yielding under the caress, and the creature’s pathetic dependence only increased his melancholy. “It costs me so little, and means so much to him,” he thought, and continued to soothe Olver’s temples with the tips of his fingers. They sat in silence for some time, a silence disturbed only by the sigh of a tired dog in his sleep, or by the falling apart and flaring of a log. Presently Olver said, in a meditative tone, without moving, “You hated me, Nicco, when you first came in and I asked you where you had been. Yet I have often asked you that, and you have not been angry.” “You knew where I had been: driving sheep for Mr. Morland,” replied Lovel mechanically.