“You well deserve all the love he bears you,” said Len-drick, grasping his hand and pressing it affectionately. “How could I deserve it? Such a man's friendship is above all the merits of one like me. Why, sir, it is honor and distinction before the world. I would not barter his regard for me to have a seat beside him on the Bench. By the way,” added he, cautiously, “let him not see the papers this morning. They are at it again about his retirement. They say that Lord Wilmington had actually arranged the conditions, and that the Chief had consented to everything; and now they are beaten. You have heard, I suppose, the Ministry are out?” “No; were they Whigs?” asked Lendrick, innocently. Haire and Fossbrooke laughed heartily at the poor doctor's indifference to party, and tried to explain to him something of the struggle between rival factions, but his mind was full of home events, and had no place for more. “Tell Haire,” said he at last,--“tell Haire the story of the letter of resignation; none so fit as he to break the tale to my father.” Fossbrooke took from his pocket a piece of paper, and handed it to Haire, saying, “Do you know that handwriting?” “To be sure I do! It is the Chief's.” “Does it seem a very formal document?” Haire scanned the back of it, and then scrutinized it all over for a few seconds. “Nothing of the kind. It's the sort of thing I have seen him write scores of times. He is always throwing off these sketches. I have seen him write the preamble to a fancied Act of Parliament,--a peroration to an imaginary speech; and as to farewells to the Bar, I think I have a dozen of them,--and one, and not the worst, is in doggerel.” Though, wherever Haire's experiences were his guides, he could manage to comprehend a question fairly enough, yet where these failed him, or wherever the events introduced into the scene characters at all new or strange, he became puzzled at once, and actually lost himself while endeavoring to trace out motives for actions, not one of which had ever occurred to him to perform. Through this inability on his part, Sir Brook was not very successful in conveying to him the details of the stolen document; nor could Haire be brought to see that the Government officials were the dupes of Sewell's artifice as much as, or even more than, the Chief himself. “I think you must tell the story yourself, Sir Brook; I feel I shall make a sad mess of it if you leave it to me,” said he, at last; “and I know, if I began to blunder, he 'd overwhelm me with questions how this was so, and why that had not been otherwise, till my mind would get into a helpless confusion, and he'd send me off in utter despair.” “I have no objection whatever, if Sir William will receive me. Indeed, Lord Wilmington charged me to make the communication in person, if permitted to do so.”