For Henry Hindes had shut himself up since the night he had thrown his child down the stairs, and refused to meet anybody, on business or otherwise. Mr Abercorn, the chief clerk, and Mr Bloxam, the cashier, had been up to Hampstead together to inquire the reason of their employer’s non-appearance in the city, and Mrs Hindes had been obliged to tell them that her husband was confined to his room and quite unfit to see them, or attend to business for the present. She was obliged to invent this fiction, for the reason that, for some days, Hindes was imbibing opium to such an extent, and raving of what distressed his conscience so freely, that she felt, at all hazards, she must keep everybody from him but herself. Captain Hindes and his wife came over, as soon as they heard of poor Hannah’s fresh trouble, and would have done anything in their power to help her, but it was a case where the assistance of one’s fellow-creatures could avail nothing, and the only thing was to wait and hope. Arthur did not see his brother on the occasion, for Henry had shut himself up in his own room, as usual, and refused to open the door. He had come chiefly to tell Hannah that they had found a little cottage to suit them in the Isle of Wight, and intended moving into it at once. She was not sorry to hear their news. She longed to get them, and everybody connected with her husband, out of the way, so that she might have him to herself, and shield him from all prying eyes and ears. During his short period of seclusion, she had carried all his meals to his room with her own hands, and coaxed him to eat them by every means in her power. And, now that the first shock was over, she ordered him to return to his official duties as she would have ordered a boy to return to school. He had reduced himself to such a state that he was no longer capable of regulating his actions. His reappearance in the office was so far beneficial that a business never proceeds so well and regularly as when the head of it is absent; but Hindes had almost rendered himself incapable, by this time, of taking any active part in the management of affairs, which he left entirely to his two chief men, Abercorn and Bloxam, whilst he sat brooding in his private room, or wandered restlessly about the streets, waiting for the doctors’ verdict respecting Wally, and wondering how much longer they would keep him in suspense. He consulted the best known physicians about the child, and brought the cleverest surgeons to see him, but the answer of each one was the same, ‘Wait, wait! This is a case for time. No one can foretell the upshot of such a fall until the child has, in a measure, done growing.’