‘What should I speak about?  Where have you been?’

’I have been to Silverbridge.  I have been to Mr Walker.  He, at any rate, is very kind’

’I don’t want his kindness.  I want no man’s kindness.  Mr Walker is the attorney, I believe.  Kind indeed!’

’I mean considerate.  Josiah, let us do the best we can in this trouble.  We have had others as heavy before.’

’But none to crush me as this will crush me.  Well; what am I to do?  Am I to go to prison—­tonight?’ At this moment his daughter returned with a candle, and the mother could not make her answer at once.  It was a wretched, poverty-stricken room.  By degrees the carpet had disappeared, which had been laid down some nine or ten years since, when they had first come to Hogglestock, and which even then had not been new.  Now nothing but a poor fragment of it remained in front of the fire-place.  In the middle of the room there was a table which had once been large; but one flap of it was gone altogether, and the other flap sloped grievously towards the floor, the weakness of old age having fallen into its legs.  There were two or three smaller tables about, but they stood propped against walls, thence obtaining a security which their own strength would not give them.  At the further end of the room there was an ancient piece of furniture, which was always called ’papa’s secretary’, at which Mr Crawley customarily sat and wrote his sermons, and did all work that was done by him within the house.  The man who had made it, some time in the last century, had intended it to be a locked guardian for domestic documents, and the receptacle for all that was most private in the house of some paterfamilias.  But beneath the hands of Mr Crawley it always stood open; and with the exception of the small space at which he wrote, was covered with dog’s-eared books, from nearly all of which the covers had disappeared.

There were there two odd volumes of Euripides, a Greek Testament, an Odyssey, a duodecimo Pindar, and a miniature Anacreon.  There was half a Horace—­the two first books of the Odes at the beginning and the De Arte Poetica at the end having disappeared.  There was a little bit of a volume of Cicero, and there were Caesar’s ‘Commentaries’ in two volumes, so stoutly bound that they had defied the combined ill-usage of time and the Crawley family.  All these were piled upon the secretary, with many others—­odd volumes of sermons and the like; but the Greek and Latin lay at the top, and showed signs of frequent use.  There was one arm-chair in the room—­a Windsor chair, as such used to be called, made soft by an old cushion in the back, in which Mr Crawley sat when both he and his wife were in the room, and Mrs Crawley when he was absent.  And there was an old horsehair sofa—­now almost denuded of its horsehair—­but that, like the tables required the assistance of a friendly wall.  Then there was a half a dozen of other chairs—­all of different sorts—­and