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 occasionally stray in; but we are not musical in the law, and soon eject it. I hope Mr. Jarndyce is as well as his friends could wish him?”

I thanked Mr. Vholes, and said he was quite well.

“I have not the pleasure to be admitted among the number of his friends myself,” said Mr. Vholes, “and I am aware that the gentlemen of our profession are sometimes regarded in such quarters with an unfavorable eye. Our plain course, however, under good report and evil report, and all kinds of prejudice, (we are the victims of prejudice) is to have everything openly carried on. How do you find Mr. C looking, Miss Summerson?”

“He looks very ill. Dreadfully anxious.”

“Just so,” said Mr. Vholes.

He stood behind me, with his long black figure reaching nearly to the ceiling of those low rooms; feeling the pimples on his face as if they were ornaments, and speaking inwardly and evenly as though there were not a human passion or emotion in his nature.

“Mr. Woodcourt is in attendance upon Mr. C, I believe?” he resumed.

“Mr. Woodcourt is his disinterested friend,” I answered.

“But I mean in professional attendance, medical attendance.”

“That can do little for an unhappy mind,” said I.

“Just so,” said Mr. Vholes.

So slow, so eager, so bloodless and gaunt, I felt as if Richard were wasting away beneath the eyes of this adviser, and there were something of the Vampire in him.

“Miss Summerson,” said Mr. Vholes, very slowly rubbing his gloved hands, as if, to his cold sense of touch, they were much the same in black kid or out of it, “this was an ill-advised marriage of Mr. C's,”

I begged he would excuse me for discussing it. They had been engaged when they were both very young, I told him (a little indignantly), and when the prospect before them was much fairer and brighter. When Richard had not yielded himself to the unhappy influence which now darkened his life.

“Just so,” assented Mr. Vholes again. “Still, with a view to everything being openly carried on, I will, with your permission. Miss Summerson, observe to you that I consider this a very ill-advised marriage indeed. I owe the opinion, not only to Mr. C's connexions, against whom I should naturally wish to protect myself, but also to my own reputation—dear to myself, as a professional man aiming to keep respectable; dear to my three girls at home, for whom I am striving to realise some little independence; dear, I will even say, to my aged father, whom it is my privilege to support.”

“It would become a very different marriage, a much happier and better marriage, another marriage altogether, Mr. Vholes,” said I, “if Richard were persuaded to turn his back on the fatal pursuit in which you are engaged with him.”

Mr. Vholes, with a noiseless cough—or rather gasp—into one of his black gloves, inclined his head as if he did not wholly dispute even that.

“Miss Summerson,” he said, “it may be so; and I freely admit that the young lady who has taken Mr. C's name upon herself in so ill