He could not guess his visitor’s thoughts, and it was well for his peace of mind that he could not. For Mr. Littimer’s thoughts were, respectably, paternal. He thought of Mr. Crichton, sen., and still more of the senior Mrs. Crichton, once “own woman” to Mrs. Steerforth. Ah! those old days and those old loves! How sad and bad and mad it was—for Mr. Littimer’s poet was Browning, as his host’s was Henley, as suited the difference in their dates—and how they had deceived old Crichton between them! So this was _his_ boy, his, Littimer’s, though no one knew it save himself and the dead woman! And as he gazed, with respectable fondness, at this image, modernized, modified, subdued, of his own respectability, he reflected that there was something in heredity, after all. And he smiled, respectably, as he remembered his boy’s opinion that the union of butler and lady’s maid was perhaps the happiest of all combinations. Perhaps, yes; but without any perhaps, if the combination included the valet. Unhappy, on the other hand, were those combinations from which valets were pointedly excluded. There was that outrageous young person whom Mr. James left behind at Naples and who turned upon him, the respectable Littimer, like a fury, when he was prepared to overlook her past in honourable marriage. His meditations were interrupted by Mrs. Crichton, who had been mentally piecing together her recollections of “David Copperfield”—her Guv. had given her a Dickens course—and had now arrived at a conclusion. “Axin’ yer pardon, mister,” she said (being still, as we have stated, a little vulgar when excited), “but if you was valet to Mr. James Steerforth, you’re the man as ’elped ’im to ruin that pore gal, and as afterwards went to quod for stealin’. I blushes”—here her eye fell on the Guv., who quietly dropped the correction “blush”—“I _blush_ for yer, Mr. Littimer.” “Ah, ma’am,” Mr. Littimer respectably apologized, “I attribute my past follies entirely to having lived a thoughtless life in the service of young men; and to having allowed myself to be led by them into weaknesses, which I had not the strength to resist.”