Miss Carr seemed to breathe more freely as I said these words, and then there was another interval of silence. "Is Mr Hallett poor?" she asked then. "Oh yes, very poor," I said. "He has been obliged to stop his work over his invention sometimes, because the money has to go to buy wine and little choice things for poor Mrs Hallett. She is always repining and talking of the days when she had her conservatory and carriage, and, worst of all, she blames poor Hallett so for his want of ambition. Yes, Miss Carr," I said, repeating myself to willing ears, "and he is one of the truest and best of men. He was not always a workman, you know." "Indeed!" she said; and I saw that she bent her head lower as she listened. "No," I said enthusiastically, as I, in my heart, set up Stephen Hallett as the model I meant to imitate. "His father was a surgeon in Warwickshire, and Mr Hallett was at college--at Oxford, where he was working to take honours." Miss Carr's lips parted as she still sat with her head bent. "He told me all about it one evening. He was sent for home one day to find his father dying; and, a week later, poor Mr Hallett found himself with all his father's affairs upon his hands, and that he had died heavily in debt." Miss Carr's head was slowly raised, and I felt proud then to see how I had interested her. "Then," I continued, "he had to try what he could do. He could not go back to college; for it took everything, even the furniture, to pay off his father's debts, and then, one day, Miss Carr, he had to sit down and think how he was to keep his widowed mother, and his sister, and himself." Miss Carr was now sitting with her head resting upon her hand, her elbow upon her knee, listening intently to all I said. "Mr Hallett and his father had some type and a little press in one of the rooms, with which they used to print poems and little pamphlets, and Mr Hallett had learnt enough about printing to make him, when he had taken his mother and sister up to London, try and get employment in an office. And he did; and he says he used to be horribly afraid of being found out and treated as an impostor; but by working with all his might he used to manage to keep up with the slow, lazy ones, and then, by degrees, he passed them; and now--oh, you should see him!--he can set up type much faster than the quickest man who ever came into the office." "And does he keep his mother and sister now?" she said dreamily. "Oh yes," I said; "Mrs Hallett has been an invalid ever since Mr Stephen Hallett's father died." Miss Carr had sunk back in the corner of the couch, closing her eyelids, and I thought I saw a couple of tears stealing down her cheeks; but directly after she covered her face with her hands, remaining silent like that for quite half-an-hour--a silence that I respected to the end. At last she rose quietly, and held out her hand.