He received us very affectionately, and we sat down.  “If you had come a little earlier,” he said, “you would have found Woodcourt here.  There never was such a good fellow as Woodcourt is.  He finds time to look in between-whiles, when anybody else with half his work to do would be thinking about not being able to come.  And he is so cheery, so fresh, so sensible, so earnest, so—­everything that I am not, that the place brightens whenever he comes, and darkens whenever he goes again.”

“God bless him,” I thought, “for his truth to me!”

“He is not so sanguine, Ada,” continued Richard, casting his dejected look over the bundles of papers, “as Vholes and I are usually, but he is only an outsider and is not in the mysteries.  We have gone into them, and he has not.  He can’t be expected to know much of such a labyrinth.”

As his look wandered over the papers again and he passed his two hands over his head, I noticed how sunken and how large his eyes appeared, how dry his lips were, and how his finger-nails were all bitten away.

“Is this a healthy place to live in, Richard, do you think?” said I.

“Why, my dear Minerva,” answered Richard with his old gay laugh, “it is neither a rural nor a cheerful place; and when the sun shines here, you may lay a pretty heavy wager that it is shining brightly in an open spot.  But it’s well enough for the time.  It’s near the offices and near Vholes.”

“Perhaps,” I hinted, “a change from both—­”

“Might do me good?” said Richard, forcing a laugh as he finished the sentence.  “I shouldn’t wonder!  But it can only come in one way now—­in one of two ways, I should rather say.  Either the suit must be ended, Esther, or the suitor.  But it shall be the suit, my dear girl, the suit, my dear girl!”

These latter words were addressed to Ada, who was sitting nearest to him.  Her face being turned away from me and towards him, I could not see it.

“We are doing very well,” pursued Richard.  “Vholes will tell you so.  We are really spinning along.  Ask Vholes.  We are giving them no rest.  Vholes knows all their windings and turnings, and we are upon them everywhere.  We have astonished them already.  We shall rouse up that nest of sleepers, mark my words!”

His hopefulness had long been more painful to me than his despondency; it was so unlike hopefulness, had something so fierce in its determination to be it, was so hungry and eager, and yet so conscious of being forced and unsustainable that it had long touched me to the heart.  But the commentary upon it now indelibly written in his handsome face made it far more distressing than it used to be.  I say indelibly, for I felt persuaded that if the fatal cause could have been for ever terminated, according to his brightest visions, in that same hour, the traces of the premature anxiety, self-reproach, and disappointment it had occasioned him would have remained upon his features to the hour of his death.