By a bright fire in this light and charming room--and if you object to the reiteration of the term, I can only plead in excuse that everything was light and charming at Castle Wafer--with its few fine paintings, its glittering mirrors, its luxuriant chairs and sofas, its scattered books, and its fine harmonium, sat a deformed gentleman. Not any hideous phase of deformity that repels the eye, but simply with a hump upon his back: a small hump, the result of an accident in infancy. He had a pale, wan face, with the sharp chin usually accompanying these cases; a face that insensibly attracted you by its look of suffering, and the thoughtful earnestness of its bright, clear, well-opened hazel eyes. Of nearly middle height, that hump was the only unsightly point about him; but he was a man of suffering; and he lived chiefly alone, he and his pain. His hair was dark, silken, rather scanty; but not a thread of silver could be seen in it, though he was close on his fiftieth year. Laying down the book he was reading, Isaac St. John rose at the mention of the name; and stepped forward in the quiet, undemonstrative way characteristic of him, a glad smile lighting up his face. "George! how pleased I am to see you! So you have thought of me at last?" "I was half ashamed to come, Mr. St. John, remembering that it is five years since I came before. But I have met Mrs. St. John repeatedly in London, and sometimes Frederick; so that I have, as it were, seen you at second-hand. I have not been well, too." Suitable, perhaps, to the difference in their ages, it might be observed that while the elder man called the younger "George," he himself was addressed as "Mr. St. John." But Mr. St. John had been almost grown up when George was a baby, and could remember having nursed him. "You do not look well, George," he said, scanning the almost transparent face before him. "And--are you taller? You look so." "That's because I'm thinner. See!"--opening his coat--"I'm nothing but a skeleton." "What is wrong?" "I can't tell you. I grow thinner and thinner and weaker and weaker, and that's about all I know. I may pick up as spring comes on, and get right again; but--it may be the other way." Isaac St. John did not answer. An unpleasant reminiscence of how this young man's father had wasted away eight-and-twenty years ago kept him silent. "What will you take, George? Have you come to stay with me?" "I have come to stay with you two hours: I must be home again by nightfall if I can. And I won't take anything until my business with you is over; for I confess it is my own selfish affairs that have brought me here. Let me speak to you first." "As you will. I am ready." "Ever ready, ever willing to help us all!" returned George St. John, warm gratitude in his tone. "It is about the guardianship that I wish to speak. I thank you for accepting it." Isaac smiled. "I did not see that I could do otherwise for you."