With Raper the interview was briefer still. Fagan dryly informed his old follower that he no longer needed his services. And although Joe heard the words as a criminal might have listened to those of his last sentence, he never uttered a syllable. Fagan was brief, though bitter. He reproached him with the long years he had sheltered him beneath his roof, and reviled him for ingratitude! He spoke of him as one who had eaten the bread of idleness, and repaid an existence of ease by treachery. Once, and only once, did the insulting language he lavished on him seem to sting him beyond further endurance. It was when Fagan said: “You think me in your power, sir; you fancy that amid that mass of rubbish and confusion my affairs have been involved in, that you alone can be the guide. But I tell you here now that were it even so, I 'd rather heap them on the fire, and stand forth a beggar to the world, than harbor within my doors a man like you!” The struggle that it cost poor Joe to hear this, without reply, was great; but a sense of the deference that throughout a long life he had ever rendered to his master, overpowered all considerations of self. He indeed felt that he had been wronged; he knew all the injustice of the reproach; but he also bethought him of the many years in which that house had been his home, and that hearth his own. He was not one to remember what he had rendered in return, nor think of the long existence of toil by which he had earned his livelihood. The settled humility which was the basis of his whole character made him esteem himself as one whose station excluded all thought of those relations that exist between members of the same community; and that his conduct should be arraigned, argued that his acts possessed a degree of importance he had never attributed to them. He heard Fagan, therefore, throughout, without any effort at reply; and, heaving a faint sigh, withdrew. I have no means of knowing how Gabriac behaved in this trying emergency. All that I have heard came from Raper; and poor Joe was neither shrewd in his observation of character, nor quick to appreciate motives. The Count decided at once on a return to the Continent: perhaps he thought there might arise some chance of reconciliation with the father if Polly, for a time, at least, were withdrawn from his sight; perhaps, too, some hope there might be of arrangement of his own affairs. Raper was also to accompany them, in the prospect of finding some clerkship in an office, or some employment in a mercantile house abroad, where his knowledge of languages might be available. At all events, his protection and companionship would be useful to Polly, whenever the Count would be compelled to absent himself from home; and, lastly, the funds for the enterprise were all supplied by Joe, who contributed something under four hundred pounds,--the savings of a whole life of labor!