‘Neither Lucille nor I belong to the race of toadies,’ said Lucius; ‘but I am grateful to Providence for Miss Glenlyne’s ready acknowledgment of her niece.’ ‘I have very little doubt the old lady will act handsomely towards you both,’ replied the lawyer, solacing himself with a comfortable pinch of snuff. He seemed to have taken a wonderful liking to Lucius, and even asked him to dine, an invitation which Lucius was unable to accept. ‘I shall not have a leisure hour this week,’ he said; ‘and on Sunday I am going down to Brighton to spend the day with Miss Glenlyne.’ From Lincoln’s-inn Lucius went to Cedar House. He was especially anxious that Mr. Sivewright should not think himself neglected during Lucille’s absence. He found the old man friendly, but depressed. His son’s sudden reappearance and awful death had shaken him severely, and, despite his outward stoicism, and that asperity of manner which it was his pride to maintain, the hidden heart of the man bled inwardly. The wise physician reads the hearts of his patients almost as easily as he divines their physical ailments. Lucius saw that an unspoken grief weighed heavily on the old man’s mind. His first thought was of the simplest remedies—change of scene—occupation. That house was full of bitter associations. ‘You are an annual tenant here, I think,’ he said, when Mr. Sivewright had told him, complainingly, how a jobbing builder was patching the broken panelling of his bedroom, by order of the agent, Mr. Agar. ‘Yes, I only took the place for a year certain, and then from quarter to quarter. I might have had it for ten pounds a year less had I been willing to take a lease. But I was too wise to saddle myself with the repairs of such a dilapidated barrack.’ ‘Then you can leave at any time by the sacrifice of a quarter’s rent, or by giving a quarter’s notice.’ ‘Of course I can, but I am not going to leave. The house suits my collection, and it suits me.’ ‘I fear that you subordinate yourself to your collection. This house must keep alive painful memories.’ ‘Do you think that fire needs any breath to fan it?’ asked Homer Sivewright bitterly. ‘Keep alive! Memory never dies, nor grows weaker in the mind of age. It strengthens with advancing years, until the shadows of things gone by seem to the old more real than reality. The old live in the past as the young live in the future. I have come to the age of backward-going thoughts. And it matters nothing what scenes are round me—what walls shut-in my declining days. Memory makes its own habitation.’ Finding it vain to press the point just now, and trusting to the great healer Time, Lucius began to talk cheerily about Lucille. Mr. Sivewright seemed heartily glad to hear of Miss Glenlyne’s kindness, and the probability of fortune following from that kindness by and by, as the lawyer had suggested. There was no touch of jealousy in the old man’s half regretful tone when he said: