When Herries re-entered his house, he did not go up to his own rooms at once, but turned into his partner’s office, which was on the ground floor, to the front. It was a smaller apartment than his own, and its aspect was even more strictly in keeping with the dry and severe nature of the legal profession. Wire blinds shielded the rather grimy windows from the street, and piles of dusty documents, tied with tape, covered the bare tables with a kind of methodical litter. A scorching fire, untidily smothered in its own ashes, heated the room to a stifling closeness. Creighton himself was a tall, lean man, long over fifty, gaunt as a withered reed, with a face of a yellowish waxen pallor, which betokened delicacy—a good deal of reddish whisker, fading into grey, and sparse hair of the same colour. The rusty black of his dress was respectable; a shrewd eye, a dry manner, constituted the rest of the outward man. Of the inward, little, if anything, was known to anyone, even to his partner. He was the son of a minister; a deadly quarrel with his family in early life had separated him from every individual of his own blood. So much was known. He made no friends, and cared for nothing in the world but his business—so much seemed apparent. Between the man and his younger, but superior, partner, there existed a certain, but absolutely unspoken sympathy; there was a decided likeness in the strength of their reserve and in the solitude of their lives. As a matter of fact, though Herries, in his youthful hardness, never dreamed of such a thing, the elder man cherished towards the younger, hidden as though it were a crime, a sentiment of deep, and even soft affection. Herries attracted, dominated, and possessed his partner; yet no one knew, as Creighton did, his faults and weaknesses. And no one dreaded for him, as Creighton did, with the experience of an embittered life behind him—the effects of the cold solitude and dry absorption in business in which the young man lived. He was for ever making efforts—little, tentative timid efforts—to influence Herries to relax the young severity of his aspect, and the rigid regularity of his habits. It was sometimes rather an odd game that the two played between them, out of business hours, and, in an initiated onlooker, would have provoked a smile. As Herries entered his partner’s room on the present occasion, the latter, rather like a school-boy caught in some illicit act, slipped a book under some papers on his table. It was a little, coarsely-covered brown book, seen, at that day, on the tables of all men, gentle and simple, but perhaps not quite the most suitable reading for an elderly lawyer. Herries took a seat, his accustomed one in interviews with his partner. ’This room is over-hot, Creighton, surely,’ he said, ’but comforting enough after the streets.’