s impertinence.

"You seem to have been muddling things nicely in my absence," observed
Trimmer after a moment, with cool audacity.

"Have I? That's all you know. Who told you what I've been doing?"

"Your heir is dead, I hear. I hope you had nothing to do with that."

"What do you mean, sir--what do you mean?"

"I mean that I hope you didn't send him away to the war to save money and
keep him from further debt."

"My family affairs are nothing to do with you, sir."

"So you have told me for the last forty years, sir. I liked the young
man. There was nothing bad about him. But I hear you drove him to
forgery."

"It's a lie--a lie!"

"How did he get your checks?"

The miser made no answer. Trimmer came over, and fixed glittering eyes
upon him. The old man cowered.

"You've ruined the boy, and sent him to the war. I can see it in your
face. I knew what would happen if I let you alone--I knew you'd do some
rascally meanness that--"

"Trimmer, it's a lie!" cried the old man, shaking as with a palsy, and
drawing further down into his pillow. "I'm an old man--I'm helpless--I
won't be bullied."

"This is one of the occasions when I feel that a shaking would do you
good," declared Trimmer.

"No, no--not now--not again! Last time, I was bad for a week. The shock
might kill me. It would be murder."

"Well, and would that matter?" asked Trimmer, callously. He stood at the
bedside, with a duster in one hand and a medicine-glass in the other,
polishing the glass in the most leisurely fashion, and speaking in hard,
even tones. He looked down upon the old wreck as on the carcase of a dead
dog.

They were a strange pair, these two, and the world outside, although it
knew something of the influence of Trimmer over his master, had no
conception of its real extent. Trimmer ought to have been a master of
men; but some defect in his mental equipment at the beginning of life, or
an unkind fate, was responsible for his becoming a menial. He was a slave
of habit, a stickler for scrupulous tidiness. A dusty room or an
ill-folded suit of clothes would agitate him more than the rocking of an
empire. He entered the service of Herresford when quite a young man, and
that service had become a habit with him, and he could not break it. He
was bound to his menial occupation by bonds of steel; and the idea of
doing without Trimmer was as inconceivable to his master as the idea of
going without clothes. The miser, who followed no man