"Ah! but I do. It has been bothering me all the way to Paris--all the way back. I have been building fancy castles concerning it. I have been one gigantic, unmitigated schemer since I saw you last, planning for a happiness which is yours by a word, and which you deserve, Sid Hinchford. I feel that your life might be greatly changed, and that it is in your power to effect it." "Were it my wish, it is too late. As it is not my wish--as I do not believe you," he added, bluntly--"as I have outlived my youthful follies, and am sober, serious, and unromantic--as I have made my choice, and know where my happiness lies, I will ask you not to pain me--not to torture me, by a continuance of this subject." "Let me just give you a sketch of what she said to me." "I will hear no more!" he cried, with an impatient stamp of his foot. "I have done," said Maurice; "subject deferred _sine die_--or tied round the neck with a big stone, and sunk for ever in the waters of oblivion. By George, Sid, that's a neat phrase, isn't it?--only it reminds one of drowning a puppy. And now to business." "What more?" asked Sidney, curtly. His cousin had annoyed him; stirred up the acrimony of his nature, and destroyed all that placidity of demeanour which he had fostered lately. He felt that he rather hated Maurice Hinchford again; that his cousin was ever a dark blot in the landscape, with his robust health, loud voice, and self-sufficiency. This man paraded his own knowledge of human nature too obtrusively, and spoke as if his listener was a child; he professed to have discerned in Harriet Wesden an affection for the old lover to whom she had been engaged--as if he, Sidney Hinchford, had been blind all his life, or was morally blind then! Sidney would be glad to hear the last of him--to be left to himself once more; his cousin was an intrusion--he desired no further speech with him, and he implied as much by his last impatient query. "It's something entirely new, Sidney, and therefore you need not fear any old topics being intruded on your notice. I have brought a friend to see you." "Take him away again." "No, I'd rather not, thank you," was the aggravating response; "I made my mind up to bring him, and he's waiting in the shop." "Maurice--you insult me!" "Pardon me, cousin, but the end must justify the means. He has come from Paris to see you; he would have been here before, had not illness prevented him." "Who is this man?" "The cleverest man in Europe, I'm told--an eccentric being, with a wonderful mine of cleverness beneath his eccentricity. A man who has made the defects of vision his one study, and has become great in consequence. Sidney, you must see him!" "You bring him here at your own expense, to inspect a hopeless case; you will shame me by being beholden to you--to you, of all men in the world!" "I thought we had got over the past--forgiven it?" "Yes, but----"