Page:Henry Northcote (IA henrynorthcote00snairich).pdf/385

 *hanced his capacity for action. He discarded his carpet slippers in favor of boots, and set his hat, gloves, and overcoat in a place where he could take them up immediately. He placed the briefs confided to him by the solicitor carefully in his pocket. There were no other portable objects of value belonging to him except a quantity of large and loose manuscript sheets, numbering some two thousand pages, the "Note towards an Essay on Optimism," that fruit of six years' labor. These he collected from divers drawers in the writing-table, and piled them into one upstanding heap.

He stood surveying this proud edifice with a rueful smile when the old woman returned at last, bearing a gallon of paraffin contained in a tin.

"Thank you," he said, taking it from her. "You may keep the change. If I spoke to you rather roughly just now, I hope you will not mind it. The fact is, I have a great deal of work to get through, and it has made me rather irritable."

The old charwoman, immensely mollified by the tone in which she was now addressed, thanked him humbly, and after standing a moment irresolutely, in which she further considered the question of how far it would be now expedient to attempt the making of the bed, a daily duty which with all her soul she yearned to perform, decided it would not be politic to reopen the subject. Therefore she retired crestfallen, because she had failed to carry out a régime which was the foremost function of her life; yet a little exalted also by the apology which had been so feelingly rendered to her by one who wore a nimbus; and above all, tremulous with excitement by reason of having ninepence in her