On the whole, it was a hard dilemma in which the poor young man found himself. He, too, like Nancy, kept realising the interior of that other little house in Grove Street. Both of them, by dint of that acquaintance with their neighbours which everybody has in a small community, came to a moderately correct guess at what was going on there. Young Mr Rider sat in heavy thought, sometimes bursting out into violent gestures which fortunately nobody witnessed; sometimes uttering sighs which all but blew out his lights--impatient, urgent sighs, not of melancholy but of anger and resistance--the sighs of a young man who found circumstances intolerable, and yet was obliged to confess, with sore mortification and humbling, that he could not mend them, and behoved to endure. The visions that kept gliding across his eyes drove him half as wild as poor Mrs Christian: one moment a pretty young wife, all the new house wanted to make it fully tenable; but he had scarcely brought her across the threshold when a ghastly figure in a chair was carried over it after her, upstairs into the bridal apartments, and another woman, soured and drawn awry by pressure of poverty, constitutionally shabby, vehement, and high-tempered, pervaded the new habitation. No use saying pshaw! and pah!--no use swearing bigger oaths,--no use pitching unoffending books into the corners, or breathing out those short deep breaths of desperation. This was in reality the state of affairs. Midnight did not change the aspect it had worn in the morning. Pondering all the night through would bring no light on the subject. Nothing could change those intolerable circumstances. The poor young surgeon threw his coat off in the heat and urgency of his thoughts, and pitched it from him like the books. There was no comfort or solace to be found in all that world of fancy. Only this morning sweeter dreams had filled this disordered apartment. In imagination, he had helped his Bessie to minister to the comfort of the poor old sick parents in Mrs Thomson’s house. Now he knitted his brows desperately over it, but could find no outlet. Unless some good fairy sent him a patient in the middle of the night, the chances were that the morning would find him pursuing that same interminable brown study of which nothing could come. * * * * *