Mr. Stenhouse said nothing, but Horace saw that he paused in the act of peeling an orange, and fixed upon himself a broad, full smiling stare; a look in which the entire eyes, mouth, face of the gazer seemed to take part--a look which anybody would have said conveyed the very soul of openness and candour, but which Horace somehow did not much care to encounter. Mr. Stenhouse looked at him steadily, as if with a smiling consideration of what he might happen to mean, glanced aside with a slight malicious air of humour at Mr. Pouncet, gave a slight laugh, and went on peeling his orange. The whole pantomime tended somehow to diminish the young schemer's confidence in his own power, which naturally led him to proceed rather more vehemently and significantly than he had intended with what he had to say. "The case was this," said Horace, with somewhat too marked a tone--"Mortlock was a solicitor and agent among others to a Sir Roger Mountjoy, a country baronet. Sir Roger was very careless about his affairs, and left them very much in his agent's hands; and, besides, was embarrassed in his circumstances, and in great need of ready money. Mortlock somehow obtained private information concerning a portion of his client's land which more than tripled its value. After which he persuaded the baronet to sell it to him at a very low price, on pretence that it was comparatively worthless, and that he made the purchase out of complacency to meet the pressing needs of his patron. Immediately after the sale a public discovery was made of a valuable vein of lead, which Mortlock immediately set about working, and made a fortune out of. A dozen years after, when the baronet was dead, his heirs brought an action against the solicitor, maintaining that the sale was null and void, and demanding compensation. Only the counsel for the plaintiff has been heard as yet. What do you think they will make of such a plea?" Mr. Pouncet set down upon the table the glass he was about raising to his lips, and spilt a few drops of his wine. He was taken by surprise; but the momentary shock of such an appeal, made to him in the presence of Stenhouse, and under _his_ eye as it was, did not overwhelm the old lawyer as Horace, in the self-importance of his youth, imagined it would. His complexion was too gray and unvarying to show much change of colour for anything, and the only real evidence of his emotion were these two or three drops of spilt wine. But he cleared his throat before he answered, and spoke after a pause in a very much less condescending and encouraging tone.