ind, sir."

"Ah!" said Mr. Thompson, with a sigh of relief. "Gravelkind, indeed!
Gavelkind! An old Kentish"--He was going to expound, but Sir Austin
assured him he knew it, and a very absurd law it was, adding, "I should
like to look at your son's notes, or remarks on the judiciousness of
that family arrangement, if he had any."

"You were making notes, or referring to them, as we entered," said Mr.
Thompson to the sucking lawyer; "a very good plan, which I have always
enjoined on you. Were you not?"

Ripton stammered that he was afraid he hid not any notes to show, worth
seeing.

"What were you doing then, sir?"

"Making notes," muttered Ripton, looking incarnate subterfuge.

"Exhibit!"

Ripton glanced at his desk and then at his father; at Sir Austin, and at
the confidential clerk. He took out his key. It would not fit the hole.

"Exhibit!" was peremptorily called again.

In his praiseworthy efforts to accommodate the keyhole, Ripton
discovered that the desk was already unlocked. Mr. Thompson marched to
it, and held the lid aloft. A book was lying open within, which Ripton
immediately hustled among a mass of papers and tossed into a dark
corner, not before the glimpse of a coloured frontispiece was caught by
Sir Austin's eye.

The baronet smiled, and said, "You study Heraldry, too? Are you fond of
the science?"

Ripton replied that he was very fond of it--extremely attached, and
threw a further pile of papers into the dark corner.

The notes had been less conspicuously placed, and the search for them
was tedious and vain. Papers, not legal, or the fruits of study, were
found, that made Mr. Thompson more intimate with the condition of
his son's exchequer; nothing in the shape of a remark on the Law of
Gavelkind.

Mr. Thompson suggested to his son that they might be among those
scraps he had thrown carelessly into the dark corner. Ripton, though he
consented to inspect them, was positive they were not there.

"What have we here?" said Mr. Thompson, seizing a neatly folded paper
addressed to the Editor of a law publication, as Ripton brought them
forth, one by one. Forthwith Mr. Thompson fixed his spectacles and read
aloud:

"To the Editor of the 'Jurist.'

"Sir,--In your recent observations on the great case of Crim"--

Mr. Thompson hem'd! and stopped short, like a man who comes unexpectedly
upon a snake in his path. Mr. Beazley's feet shuffled. Sir Austin
changed the position of an arm.