“It is not from my side advances should come,” John said, turning his face to the wall with an obstinacy which was almost sullen; while at the same time he said to himself at the bottom of his heart, What does it matter? These were but the merest outward details. The real question was very different. Did a woman know what love meant?--was it anything but a diversion to her--an amusement? was what he was asking himself; while a man, on the other hand, might give up his life for it, and annul himself, all for a passing smile--a smile that was quite as bright to the next comer. Such thoughts were thorns in John’s pillow as he tossed and groaned. They burned and gnawed at his heart worse than his outward wounds; and there were no cool applications which could be made to them. He did not want to be spoken to, nor to have even the friendliest light thrown upon the workings of his mind. To be let alone--to be left to make the best of it--to be allowed to resume his work quietly, and go and come, and wait until the problem had been solved for him, or until he himself had solved it,--it seemed to John that he wished for nothing more. “That may be,” said Mr Whichelo; “but all the same you don’t take much pains to conciliate him--though that is not my business. A man who has had a number of us round him all his life always anxious to conciliate--as good men as himself any day,” the head-clerk added, with some heat, “but still in a measure dependent upon his will for our bread--it takes a strong head to stand such a strain, Mr Mitford. An employer is pretty near a despot, unless he’s a very good man. I don’t want to say a word against Mr Crediton----” “Much better not,” said John, with another revulsion of feeling, not indisposed to knock the man down who ventured to thrust in his opinion between Kate’s father and himself; and Mr Whichelo for the moment was silent, with a half-alarmed sense of having gone too far. “He is very grateful to you for your promptitude and energy,” he continued: “but for you these papers must have been lost. It would have been my fault,” said Mr Whichelo, with animation, yet in a low tone. There was even emotion in his words, and something like a tear in his eye. If he had been a great general or a distinguished artist, his professional reputation could not have been more precious to him. But John was preoccupied, and paid no attention. He did not care for having saved Mr Whichelo’s character any more than Mr Crediton’s money, though he had, indeed, risked his life to do it. He had been in such a mood that to risk his life was rather agreeable to him than otherwise, not for any “good motive,” but simply as he would have thrust his burnt leg or arm into cold water for the momentary relief of his pain. “Don’t let us talk any more about it,” he said; “they are safe, I suppose, and there is an end of it. But how I got out of that place,” he added, turning himself once more impatiently on his uneasy bed, “is a mystery to me.”