The client, with his dejection insensibly relieved and his vague hopes rekindled, takes pen and ink and writes the draft, not without perplexed consideration and calculation of the date it may bear, implying scant effects in the agent’s hands.  All the while, Vholes, buttoned up in body and mind, looks at him attentively.  All the while, Vholes’s official cat watches the mouse’s hole.

Lastly, the client, shaking hands, beseeches Mr. Vholes, for heaven’s sake and earth’s sake, to do his utmost to “pull him through” the Court of Chancery.  Mr. Vholes, who never gives hopes, lays his palm upon the client’s shoulder and answers with a smile, “Always here, sir.  Personally, or by letter, you will always find me here, sir, with my shoulder to the wheel.”  Thus they part, and Vholes, left alone, employs himself in carrying sundry little matters out of his diary into his draft bill book for the ultimate behoof of his three daughters.  So might an industrious fox or bear make up his account of chickens or stray travellers with an eye to his cubs, not to disparage by that word the three raw-visaged, lank, and buttoned-up maidens who dwell with the parent Vholes in an earthy cottage situated in a damp garden at Kennington.

Richard, emerging from the heavy shade of Symond’s Inn into the sunshine of Chancery Lane—­for there happens to be sunshine there to-day—­walks thoughtfully on, and turns into Lincoln’s Inn, and passes under the shadow of the Lincoln’s Inn trees.  On many such loungers have the speckled shadows of those trees often fallen; on the like bent head, the bitten nail, the lowering eye, the lingering step, the purposeless and dreamy air, the good consuming and consumed, the life turned sour.  This lounger is not shabby yet, but that may come.  Chancery, which knows no wisdom but in precedent, is very rich in such precedents; and why should one be different from ten thousand?

Yet the time is so short since his depreciation began that as he saunters away, reluctant to leave the spot for some long months together, though he hates it, Richard himself may feel his own case as if it were a startling one.  While his heart is heavy with corroding care, suspense, distrust, and doubt, it may have room for some sorrowful wonder when he recalls how different his first visit there, how different he, how different all the colours of his mind.  But injustice breeds injustice; the fighting with shadows and being defeated by them necessitates the setting up of substances to combat; from the impalpable suit which no man alive can understand, the time for that being long gone by, it has become a gloomy relief to turn to the palpable figure of the friend who would have saved him from this ruin and make him his enemy.  Richard has told Vholes the truth.  Is he in a hardened or a softened mood, he still lays his injuries equally at that door; he was thwarted, in that quarter, of a set purpose, and that purpose could only originate in the one subject that is resolving his existence into itself; besides, it is a justification to him in his own eyes to have an embodied antagonist and oppressor.