Valentine went trudging home through the rain, miserable and dispirited, and found a visitor had arrived--Mrs. Cramp. His mother and sister were upstairs then, busy over his trunks; so Mrs. Cramp had him all to herself. She had liked Valentine very much. When he went wrong, it put her out frightfully, and since then she had not spared him: which of course put out Valentine. "Yes, it will be a change," he acknowledged, in reply to a remark of hers. "A flourishing solicitor here, and a servant there. For that's what I shall be over yonder, I conclude; I can't expect to be my own master. You don't know how good the business was, Aunt Mary Ann, at the time my father died. If I could only have kept it!" "You could not expect to keep it," said Mrs. Cramp, who sat facing him, her bonnet tilted back from her red and comely face, her purple stuff gown pulled up above her boots. "I should have kept it, but for now and then taking a little drop too much," confessed poor Valentine: who was deeper in the dumps that day than he had ever been before. "I don't know that," said Mrs. Cramp. "The business was a usurped one." "A what?" said Valentine. "There is an overruling Power above us, you know," she went on. "I am quite sure, Valentine--I have learnt it by experience--that injustice never answers in the long run. It may seem to succeed for a time; but it does not last: it cannot and it does not. If a man rears himself on another's downfall, causing himself that downfall that he may rise, his prosperity rests on no sure foundation. In some way or other the past comes home to him; and he suffers for it, if not in his own person, in that of his children. Ill-gotten riches bring a curse, never a blessing." "What a growler you are, Aunt Mary Ann!" "I don't mean it for growling, Valentine. It is true." "It's not true." "Not true! The longer I live the more examples I see of it. A man treads another down that he may rise himself: and there he stands high and flourishing. But wait a few years, and look then. He is gone. Gone, and no trace of his prosperity left. And when I mark that, I recall that verse in the Psalms of David: 'I went by, and lo, he was gone: I sought him, but his place was nowhere to be found.' That verse is a true type of real life, Valentine." "I don't believe it," cried Valentine. "And where's the good of having the Psalms at your finger-ends?" "You do believe it. Why, Valentine, take your own case. Was there ever a closer exemplification? Tom was injured; put down; I may say, crushed by you and your father. Yes, crushed: crushed out of his rights. _His_ father made the business; and the half of it, at any rate, ought to have been Tom's. Instead of that, your father deposed him and usurped it. He repented when he was dying, and charged you to remedy the wrong. But you did not; _you_ usurped it. And what has it ended in?" "Ended in?" cried Valentine vacantly.