Mr. Rodman gave an ‘All right,’ nodded to Hubert, who paid no attention, and took his departure.

‘You’ve had a long pull of it,’ Richard began, as he took his chair again, and threw his legs into an easy position.  ’Shall I close the windows?  Maybe you don’t like the draught.’

‘Thank you; I feel no draught.’

The working man had the advantage as yet.  Hubert in vain tried to be at ease, whilst Mutimer was quite himself, and not ungraceful in his assumption of equality.  For one thing, Hubert could not avoid a comparison between his own wasted frame and the other’s splendid physique; it heightened the feeling of antagonism which possessed him in advance, and provoked the haughtiness he had resolved to guard against.  The very lineaments of the men foretold mutual antipathy.  Hubert’s extreme delicacy of feature was the outward expression of a character so compact of subtleties and refinements, of high prejudice and jealous sensibility, of spiritual egoism and all-pervading fastidiousness, that it was impossible for him not to regard with repugnance a man who represented the combative principle, even the triumph, of the uncultured classes.  He was no hidebound aristocrat; the liberal tendencies of his intellect led him to scorn the pageantry of long-descended fools as strongly as he did the blind image-breaking of the mob; but in a case of personal relations temperament carried it over judgment in a very high-handed way.  Youth and disappointment weighed in the scale of unreason.  Mutimer, on the other hand, though fortune helped him to forbearance, saw, or believed he saw, the very essence of all he most hated in this proud-eyed representative of a county family.  His own rough-sculptured comeliness corresponded to the vigour and practicality and zeal of a nature which cared nothing for form and all for substance; the essentials of life were to him the only things in life, instead of, as to Hubert Eldon, the mere brute foundation of an artistic super structure.  Richard read clearly enough the sentiments with which his visitor approached him; who that is the object of contempt does not readily perceive it?  His way of revenging himself was to emphasise a tone of good fellowship, to make it evident how well he could afford to neglect privileged insolence.  In his heart he triumphed over the disinherited aristocrat; outwardly he was civil, even friendly.

Hubert had made this call with a special purpose.

‘I am charged by Mrs. Eldon,’ he began, ’to thank you for the courtesy you have shown her during my illness.  My own thanks likewise I hope you will accept.  We have caused you, I fear, much inconvenience.’

Richard found himself envying the form and tone of this deliverance; he gathered his beard in his hands and gave it a tug.

‘Not a bit of it,’ he replied.  ’I am very comfortable here.  A bedroom and a place for work, that’s about all I want.’

Hubert barely smiled.  He wondered whether the mention of work was meant to suggest comparisons.  He hastened to add—­