“Do you also write then? And in the same style as my brother? And do you like that style? And do people appreciate it in America? I don’t write, but I think I feel.” To these and various other inquiries and remarks the young lady treated me, till we heard her brother’s step in the hall again, and Mark Ambient reappeared. He looked flushed and serious, and I supposed that he had seen something to alarm him in the condition of his child. His sister apparently had another idea; she gazed at him a moment as if he were a burning ship on the horizon, and simply murmured, “Poor old Mark!” “I hope you are not anxious,” I said. “No, but I ‘m disappointed. She won’t let me in. She has locked the door, and I ‘m afraid to make a noise.” I suppose there might have been something ridiculous in a confession of this kind, but I liked my new friend so much that for me it did n’t detract from his dignity. “She tells me--from behind the door--that she will let me know if he is worse.” “It’s very good of her,” said Miss Ambient I had exchanged a glance with Mark in which it is possible that he read that my pity for him was untinged with contempt, though I know not why he should have cared; and as, presently, his sister got up and took her bedroom candlestick, he proposed that we should go back to his study. We sat there till after midnight; he put himself into his slippers, into an old velvet jacket, lighted an ancient pipe, and talked considerably less than he had done before. There were longish pauses in our communion, but they only made me feel that we had advanced in intimacy. They helped me, too, to understand my friend’s personal situation, and to perceive that it was by no means the happiest possible. When his face was quiet, it was vaguely troubled; it seemed to me to show that for him, too, life was a struggle, as it has been for many another man of genius. At last I prepared to leave him, and then, to my ineffable joy, he gave me some of the sheets of his forthcoming book,--it was not finished, but he had indulged in the luxury, so dear to writers of deliberation, of having it “set up,” from chapter to chapter, as he advanced,--he gave me, I say, the early pages, the _prémices_, as the French have it, of this new fruit of his imagination, to take to my room and look over at my leisure. I was just quitting him when the door of his study was noiselessly pushed open, and Mrs. Ambient stood before us. She looked at us a moment, with her candle in her hand, and then she said to her husband that as she supposed he had not gone to bed, she had come down to tell him that Dolcino was more quiet and would probably be better in the morning. Mark Ambient made no reply; he simply slipped past her in the doorway, as if he were afraid she would seize him in his passage, and bounded upstairs, to judge for himself of his child’s condition. Mrs. Ambient looked slightly discomfited, and for a moment I thought she was going to give chase to her husband.