pupil.  It was not till the third evening that he told his wife that Finn had made up his mind not to take chambers.  “Then I would have nothing more to say to him,” said Mrs. Low, savagely.  “For the present I can have nothing more to say to him.”  “But neither now nor ever,” said Mrs. Low, with great emphasis; “he has been false to you.”  “No,” said Mr. Low, who was a man thoroughly and thoughtfully just at all points; “he has not been false to me.  He has always meant what he has said, when he was saying it.  But he is weak and blind, and flies like a moth to the candle; one pities the poor moth, and would save him a stump of his wing if it be possible.”

Phineas, when he had written his letter to Mr. Low, started off for Lincoln’s Inn, making his way through the well-known dreary streets of Soho, and through St. Giles’s, to Long Acre.  He knew every corner well, for he had walked the same road almost daily for the last three years.  He had conceived a liking for the route, which he might easily have changed without much addition to the distance, by passing through Oxford Street and Holborn; but there was an air of business on which he prided himself in going by the most direct passage, and he declared to himself very often that things dreary and dingy to the eye might be good in themselves.  Lincoln’s Inn itself is dingy, and the Law Courts therein are perhaps the meanest in which Equity ever disclosed herself.  Mr. Low’s three rooms in the Old Square, each of them brown with the binding of law books and with the dust collected on law papers, and with furniture that had been brown always, and had become browner with years, were perhaps as unattractive to the eye of a young pupil as any rooms which were ever entered.  And the study of the Chancery law itself is not an alluring pursuit till the mind has come to have some insight into the beauty of its ultimate object.  Phineas, during his three years’ course of reasoning on these things, had taught himself to believe that things ugly on the outside might be very beautiful within; and had therefore come to prefer crossing Poland Street and Soho Square, and so continuing his travels by the Seven Dials and Long Acre.  His morning walk was of a piece with his morning studies, and he took pleasure in the gloom of both.  But now the taste of his palate had been already changed by the glare of the lamps in and about palatial Westminster, and he found that St. Giles’s was disagreeable.  The ways about Pall Mall and across the Park to Parliament Street, or to the Treasury, were much pleasanter, and the new offices in Downing Street, already half built, absorbed all that interest which he had hitherto been able to take in the suggested but uncommenced erection of new Law Courts in the neighbourhood of Lincoln’s Inn.  As he made his way to the porter’s lodge under the great gateway of Lincoln’s Inn, he told himself that he was glad that he had escaped, at any rate for a while, from a life so dull