“I should —­ or at least I might —­ be doing something.”

“Then you think all the work of the world rests upon the shoulders of lawyers?  I knew they had a good deal to do, but not so much as that.”

“I don’t see anything for me to do,” Rufus said despondingly.

Rufus got off his couch and began gloomily to walk up and down.

“How easily those who are doing well themselves can bear the ill haps of their friends!” he said.

Winthrop went back to his papers and studied them, with his usual calm face and in silence, for some time.  Rufus walked and cogitated for half an hour.

“I ought not to have said that, Winthrop,” were his first words.  “But now look at me!”

“With pleasure,” said Winthrop laying down his ‘answer’ —­ “I have looked at many a worse man.”

“Can’t you be serious?” said Rufus, a provoked smile forcing itself upon him.

“I thought I was rarely anything else,” said Winthrop.  “But now I look at you, I don’t see anything in the world the matter.”

“Yet look at our different positions —­ yours and mine.”

“I’d as lieve be excused,” said Winthrop.  “You always made the best show, in any position.”

“Other people don’t think so,” said Rufus, turning with a curious struggle of feeling in his face, and turning to hide it in his walk up and down.

“What ails you, Will? —­ I don’t know what you mean.”

“You deserve it!” said Rufus, swallowing something in his mind apparently, that cost him some trouble.

“I don’t know what I deserve,” said Winthrop gravely.  “I am afraid I have not got it.”

“How oddly and rightly we were nicknamed in childhood!” Rufus went on bitterly, half communing with himself. —­ “I for fiery impulse, and you for calm rule.”

“I don’t want to rule,” said Winthrop half laughing.  “And I assure you I make no effort after it.”

“You do it, and always will.  You have the love and respect and admiration of everybody that knows you —­ in a very high degree; and there is not a soul in the world that cares for me, except yourself.”

“I do not think that is true, Will,” said Winthrop after a little pause.  “But even suppose it were —­ those are not the things one lives for.”

“What does one live for then!” Rufus said almost fiercely.

“At least they are not what I live for,” said Winthrop correcting himself.

“What do you live for?”

His brother hesitated.

“For another sort of approbation —­ That I may hear ’Well done,’ from the lips of my King, —­ by and by.”

Rufus bit his lip and for several turns walked the room in silence —­ evidently because he could not speak.  Perhaps the words, ‘Them that honour me, I will honour,’ —­ might have come to his mind.  But when at last he began to talk, it was not upon that theme.

“Governor,” —­ he said in a quieter tone, —­ “I wish you would help me.”