sitting-room, where
everything was tidy and comfortable for the brief leisure of the
hard-working man. The man who did no work threw himself heavily into
the doctor's easy-chair, and rolled his bemused eyes round upon his
brother's household gods. Those book-shelves with a bust at either
corner, those red curtains drawn across the window, those prints on the
walls--all once so pleasant to the doctor's eyes--took a certain air of
squalor and wretchedness to-night which sickened him to look at. The
lamp flared wildly with an untrimmed wick, or at least Dr Rider thought
so; and threw a hideous profile of the intruder upon the wall behind
him. The hearth was cold, with that chill, of sentiment rather than
reality, naturally belonging to a summer night. Instead of a familiar
place where rest and tranquillity awaited him, that room, the only
vision of home which the poor young fellow possessed, hardened into four
walls, and so many chairs and tables, in the doctor's troubled eyes.

But it bore a different aspect in the eyes of his maudlin brother.
Looking round with those bewildered orbs, all this appeared luxury to
the wanderer. Mentally he appraised the prints over the mantelshelf, and
reckoned how much of _his_ luxuries might be purchased out of them. That
was all so much money wasted by the Croesus before him. What a mint of
money the fellow must be making; and grudged a little comfort to his
brother, his elder brother, the cleverest of the family! The dull
exasperation of selfishness woke in the mind of the self-ruined man!

"You're snug enough here," he exclaimed, "though you shut me in up-stairs
to burrow out of sight. By Jove! as if I were not good enough to face
your Carlingford patients. I've had a better practice in my day than
ever you'll see, my fine fellow, with your beggarly M.R.C.S. And you'd
have me shut myself up in my garret into the bargain! You're ashamed of
me, forsooth! You can go spending money on that rubbish there, and can't
pay a tailor's bill for your elder brother; and as for introducing me in
this wretched hole of a place, and letting me pick up a little money for
myself--I, a man with twice the experience in the profession that you
have----"

"Fred, stop that," cried the doctor--"I've had about enough. Look
here--I can't deny you shelter and what you call necessaries, because
you're my brother; but I won't submit to be ruined a second time by any
man. If I am ever to do any good in this world