As they passed through the lawyer’s outer office, Tom glanced round. With one exception, the faces of all there were strangers to him. The exception was not a very inviting person to look at, but Tom went up and shook hands with him. He was a tall, big-boned, loosely-built man of five and forty, dressed in very rusty black—an awkward, shambling sort of fellow, unshaven and uncombed, with grubby hands and bleared eyes, and with a wild shaggy mop of hair which had once been jet black, but was now thickly sprinkled with gray. The man’s features were wanting neither in power nor intellect, but they were marred by an air of habitual dissipation—of sottishness, even—which he made no effort to conceal. “Jabez Creede is still with you, I see,” said Tom, as he and the lawyer walked down the street. “Yes, I still keep him on,” answered Hoskyns, “though, if I have threatened once to turn him away, I have a hundred times. With his dirty, drunken ways, the man, as a man, is unbearable to me; but, as a clerk, I don’t know what I should do without him. For engrossing, or copying, he is useless, his hand is far too shaky. But in one other respect he is invaluable to me: his memory is like a prodigious storehouse, in which he can lay his hand on any particular article at a moment’s notice. He knows how useful he is to me, and he presumes on that knowledge to do things that I would submit to from no other clerk in my employ.” There was no difficulty in passing Tom into the gaol. In the case of a prisoner of such distinction as Mr. Dering, some of the more stringent of the prison regulations were to a certain extent relaxed. Besides which, Mr. Hoskyns and the governor were bosom friends, playing whist together two or three evenings a week the winter through, and wrangling over the odd trick, as only old companions can wrangle; so that the lawyer’s word soon placed Tom inside the magic gates, and after he had been introduced to Mr. Dux, the aforesaid governor, he might be said to be duly possessed of the Open Sesame of the grim old building. “This is kind of you, Bristow, very kind!” exclaimed Lionel, as he strode forward to greet his friend. “When we parted last we little thought that our next meeting would be in these halls of dazzling light.” He laughed a dismal laugh, and pressed Tom down into his own chair. For a moment or two Tom could not trust himself to speak. “There’s a silver lining to every cloud, you know, old boy,” he stammered out at last. “You must bear up like a brick. Please Heaven, we’ll soon have you out of this hole, and everything will come right in the long run, never fear.” He felt that it was not at all what he had intended to say, but, somehow, his usual ready flow of words seemed dried up for a little while.