lying by him. He seized it now and
swept it backwards and forwards in as large an area as he could,
apparently to ban these ugly spectres, crying in a hoarse sort of
screech--

"Back, back, Mrs. Waule! Back, Solomon!"

"Oh, Brother. Peter," Mrs. Waule began--but Solomon put his hand
before her repressingly. He was a large-cheeked man, nearly seventy,
with small furtive eyes, and was not only of much blander temper but
thought himself much deeper than his brother Peter; indeed not likely
to be deceived in any of his fellow-men, inasmuch as they could not
well be more greedy and deceitful than he suspected them of being.
Even the invisible powers, he thought, were likely to be soothed by a
bland parenthesis here and there--coming from a man of property, who
might have been as impious as others.

"Brother Peter," he said, in a wheedling yet gravely official tone,
"It's nothing but right I should speak to you about the Three Crofts
and the Manganese. The Almighty knows what I've got on my mind--"

"Then he knows more than I want to know," said Peter, laying down his
stick with a show of truce which had a threat in it too, for he
reversed the stick so as to make the gold handle a club in case of
closer fighting, and looked hard at Solomon's bald head.

"There's things you might repent of, Brother, for want of speaking to
me," said Solomon, not advancing, however. "I could sit up with you
to-night, and Jane with me, willingly, and you might take your own time
to speak, or let me speak."

"Yes, I shall take my own time--you needn't offer me yours," said Peter.

"But you can't take your own time to die in, Brother," began Mrs.
Waule, with her usual woolly tone. "And when you lie speechless you
may be tired of having strangers about you, and you may think of me and
my children"--but here her voice broke under the touching thought which
she was attributing to her speechless brother; the mention of ourselves
being naturally affecting.

"No, I shan't," said old Featherstone, contradictiously. "I shan't
think of any of you. I've made my will, I tell you, I've made my
will." Here he turned his head towards Mrs. Vincy, and swallowed some
more of his cordial.

"Some people would be ashamed to fill up a place belonging by rights to
others," said Mrs. Waule, turning her narrow eyes in the same direction.

"Oh, sister," said Solomon, with ironical softness, "you and me are not
fine, and handsome, and clever enough: