Winnie stopped and turned with the door in her hand.  Winthrop was busy clearing some books and papers from a chair by his side.  He did not speak again; when he had done he looked up and towards her; and obeying the wish of his face, as she would have done had it been any other conceivable thing, Winnie shut the door, set her candle down, and came and took the chair beside him.  But then, when she felt his arm put round her, she threw her head down upon him and burst into a fit of nervously passionate tears. That was not his wish, she knew, but she could not help it.

“Mr. Landholm,” said Winthrop, “may I trouble you to put out that candle.  We are not so extravagant here as to burn bedlights till we want them. —­ Hush, Winnie, —­” softly said his voice in her ear and his arm at the same time.

“Absurd!” said Rufus, getting up to do as he was bid.

“What?” said his brother.

“Why I really want to talk to you.”

“I am really very willing to listen.”

“But I do not want to talk to anybody beside you.”

“Winnie hears everything that is said here, Will,” said the younger brother gravely, at the same time restraining with his arm the motion he felt Winnie made to go.

“It don’t signify!” said Rufus, getting up and beginning to walk up and down the room gloomily.

“What doesn’t signify?”

“Anything! —­”

The steps were quicker and heavier, with concealed feeling.  Winthrop looked at him and was silent; while Rufus seemed to be combating some unseen grievance, by the set of his lip and nostril.

“What do you think Haye has done?” —­ he broke out, like a horse that is champing the bit.

“What?” said Winthrop.

“He has sued me.”

“Sued you!” exclaimed Winthrop, while even Winnie forgot her tears and started up.  Rufus walked.

“What do you mean, Will?”

“I mean he has sued me!” —­ said Rufus stopping short and facing them with eyes that for the moment had established a natural pyrotechny of their own.

“How, and what for?”

“How? —­ by the usual means!  What for? —­ I will tell you!”

Which he sat down to do; Winthrop and Winnie both his most earnest auditors.

“You know it was Haye’s own proposition, urged by himself, that I should go into business with him.  Nobody asked him —­ it was his own doing; it was his declared purpose and wish, unsolicited by me or my father or by anybody, to set me forward in his own line and put me in the way of making my fortune! —­ as he said.”

Winthrop knew it, and had never liked it.  He did not tell Rufus so now; he gave him nothing but the attention of his calm face; into which Rufus looked while he talked, as if it were the safe, due, and appointed treasury in which to bestow all his grievances and passionate sense of them.

“Well! —­ you know he offered, a year ago or more, that by way of making a beginning, I should take off his hands some cotton which he had lying in storage, and ship it to Liverpool on my own account; and as I had no money, I was to pay him by drawing bills in his favour upon the consignees.”