for
you make me abhor them."

"You remember me, Mr. Young Jackson?" In another voice from another
quarter.

"Most gratefully, sir. You were the ray of hope and prospering ambition
in my life. When I attended your course, I believed that I should come
to be a great healer, and I felt almost happy--even though I was still
the one boarder in the house with that horrible mask, and ate and drank
in silence and constraint with the mask before me, every day. As I had
done every, every, every day, through my school-time and from my earliest
recollection."

"What am I like, Mr. Young Jackson?"

"You are like a Superior Being to me. You are like Nature beginning to
reveal herself to me. I hear you again, as one of the hushed crowd of
young men kindling under the power of your presence and knowledge, and
you bring into my eyes the only exultant tears that ever stood in them."

"You remember Me, Mr. Young Jackson?" In a grating voice from quite
another quarter.

"Too well. You made your ghostly appearance in my life one day, and
announced that its course was to be suddenly and wholly changed. You
showed me which was my wearisome seat in the Galley of Barbox Brothers.
(When _they_ were, if they ever were, is unknown to me; there was nothing
of them but the name when I bent to the oar.) You told me what I was to
do, and what to be paid; you told me afterwards, at intervals of years,
when I was to sign for the Firm, when I became a partner, when I became
the Firm. I know no more of it, or of myself."

"What am I like, Mr. Young Jackson?"

"You are like my father, I sometimes think. You are hard enough and cold
enough so to have brought up an unacknowledged son. I see your scanty
figure, your close brown suit, and your tight brown wig; but you, too,
wear a wax mask to your death. You never by a chance remove it--it never
by a chance falls off--and I know no more of you."

Throughout this dialogue, the traveller spoke to himself at his window in
the morning, as he had spoken to himself at the Junction over-night. And
as he had then looked in the darkness, a man who had turned grey too
soon, like a neglected fire: so he now looked in the sunlight, an ashier
grey, like a fire which the brightness of the sun put out.

The firm of Barbox Brothers had been some offshoot or irregular branch of
the Public Notary and bill-broking tree. It had gained for itself a
griping reputation before the days of Young Jackson, an