“Will you give Mr. Con Heffernan's compliments, and say he would be glad to have the opportunity of a few minutes' conversation?” The servant returned immediately, and showed him upstairs into a back drawing-room, where, before a table covered with law papers and parchments, sat the venerable doctor. He had not as yet performed the usual offices of a toilet, and, with unshaven chin and uncombed hair, looked the most melancholy contrast of age, neglect, and misery, with the gorgeous furniture of a most splendid apartment. He lifted his head as the door opened, and stared fixedly at the new-comer, with an expression at once fierce and anxious, so that Heffernan, when speaking of him afterwards, said that, “Dressed as he was, in an old flannel morning-gown, dotted with black tufts, he looked for all the world like a sick tiger making his will.” “Your humble servant, sir,” said he, coldly, as Heffernan advanced with an air of cordiality; nor were the words and the accents they were uttered in lost upon the man they were addressed to. He saw how the land lay, in a second, and said eagerly, “He has not left town, I trust, sir; I sincerely hope your son has not gone.” “Yes, sir, he's off; I'm sure I don't know what he'd wait for.” “Too precipitate,--too rash by far, Mr. Hickman,” said Heffernan, seating himself, and wiping his forehead with an air of well-assumed chagrin. “Maybe so,” repeated the old man two or three times over, while he lowered his spectacles to his nose, and began hunting among his papers, as though he had other occupation in hand of more moment than the present topic. “Are you aware, sir,” said Heffernan, drawing his chair close up, and speaking in a most confidential whisper,--“are you aware, sir, that your son mistook the signal,--that when Mr. Corry took out his handkerchief and opened it on his knee, that it was in token of Lord Castlereagh's acquiescence of Mr. O'Reilly's demand,--that, in short, the peerage was at that moment his own if he wished it?” The look of dogged incredulity in the old man's face would have silenced a more sensitive advocate than Heffer-nan; but he went on: “If any one should feel angry at what has occurred, I am the person; I was the guarantee for your son's vote, and I have now to meet Lord Castle-reagh without one word of possible explanation.” “Hickman told me,” said the old man, with a voice steady and composed, “that if Mr. Corry did not raise the handkerchief to his mouth, the terms were not agreed upon; that opening it before him only meant the bargain was not quite off: more delay, more talk, Mr. Heffernan; and I think there was enough of that already.” “A complete mistake, sir,--a total misconception on his part.” “Just like Beecham being blackballed at the club,” said the doctor, with a sarcastic bitterness all his own. “With that, of course, we cannot be charged,” said Heffernan. “Why was he put up without our being apprised of it? The blackballing was Bagenal Daly's doing--”