btful whether that was
the reason. Perhaps Mr. Brimsdown felt less lonely among his legal
documents, meditating over battles he had won for dead legatees. As a
solicitor he was "strong on the Chancery side" and had gained some famous
judgments for notorious litigants--men who had loved the law so well that
their souls might well have been found--knowing no higher heaven--in the
office where the records of their forgotten lawsuits were buried. And in
death, as in life, they would have been glad to confide their affairs to
the man whose lot it had been to add "Deceased" to so many of the names on
the black steel deed-boxes which lined the shelves.

Mr. Brimsdown lived for the law. As a family lawyer he was the soul of
discretion, an excellent fighter, wary and reticent, deep as the grave,
but far safer. The grave sometimes opens and divulges a ghastly secret
from its narrow depths. There was no chance of getting anything out of Mr.
Brimsdown, dead or alive. He had no wife to extract bedroom confidences
from him, no relations to visit in expansive moments, he trusted nothing
to paper or diary, and he did not play golf. He was a solitary man, of an
habitual secretiveness deepened by years of living alone.

His lips moved now, and he spoke aloud. His voice sounded sharply in the
heavy silence.

"A calamity--nothing less. How did it happen? Was it grief for his wife?"

His face showed unusual agitation--distress even. It was well his clients
could not see him at that moment. To them he was a remote enigmatic figure
of conveyances and legal deeds; one deeply versed in human follies and
foibles, but impervious to human feeling, independent of human
companionship. The reserved glance of his cold grey eye betokened that he
guarded his own secrets as closely as he guarded the secrets entrusted to
him professionally. But there was human nature in him--deep down. It was
not much--a lock of hair in a sealed packet in his pocket-book. The giver
was dead and gone to dust, sleeping in an old churchyard near the Strand,
forgotten by all who had ever known her--except one. Sometimes in the
twilight a tall figure would stand musing beside that forgotten grave for
awhile, then turn away and walk swiftly up the narrow river street, across
the Strand, and through the archway to Grey's Inn.

"Thirty years!" he murmured. Then his mind seemed to hark back to his
previous thought, after the fashion of a man who thinks aloud--"No, no;
not his