“Well, if it was,” retorted Samantha, “it would make a noise. And that’s more than yours would.” “You shut up!” shouted Ben Lawton, with the over-vehemence of a weak nature in excitement. “Hain’t you got no decency nor compassion in ye? Has she done any harm to you? Can’t you give her a chance--to--to live it down?” While the echoes of this loud, indignant voice were still on the air, Jessica had pushed her chair back, risen, and walked straight to the door leading up-stairs. She looked at nobody as she passed, but held her pale face proudly erect, though her lips were quivering. After she had opened the door, some words seemed to come to her, and she turned. “Live it down!” she said, speaking more loudly than was her wont, to keep her faltering voice from breaking. “Live it down! Why, father, these people don’t want me to live at all!” Then she closed the door and was seen no more that day. CHAPTER IX.--THE PARTNERSHIP. Either through the softening influence of the Thanksgiving festival upon litigious natures, or by reason of the relaxing reaction from over-feasting, it happened that no clients of any kind visited Reuben Tracy’s law office next day. He came down early enough to light his own fires in both the inner and outer rooms--an experience for which he had been prepared by long observation of the effect produced by holidays upon his clerk--and he sat for a couple of hours by the stove, with his feet on the table and a book in his lap, waiting for Horace Boyce to keep the appointment. The book was an old collection of Carlyle’s earlier essays, and Reuben liked it better, perhaps, than any other member of his library family. He had not read it through, and there was a good deal in it which he seemed likely never to read. But there were other portions, long since very familiar to his mind and eye, which it was his habit to go over again whenever he had nothing else to do. The rough, thought-compelling diction rested his brain, by some curious rule of paradox. In the front of the volume he had written, “Not new books, but good books,” an apothegm adapted from a preface of an old English play which had pleased him. He was indolently ruminating on the wealth of epithet with which the portrait of Cagliostro is painted, when his expected visitor arrived. He laughed aloud at some whimsical conceit that this association of people suggested, and tossed the book aside as he rose. “I’ve been killing time,” he said, still smiling, “by reading about the prize impostor of the eighteenth century. You know it?--_The Diamond Necklace_. I like to read it. For good, downright swindling and effrontery there’s nothing anywhere like that fellow.” Horace glanced at the book as he shook hands and took off his overcoat. He said nothing, but made a mental note that Reuben had come to know about Carlyle after everybody else had ceased reading him.