subsequent promise to her cousin, as the effects of a mental
hallucination, very much to be lamented,--to be wept for, perhaps,
through a whole life, as a source of terrible sorrow to himself
and to her. But he regarded it all as a disease, of which the cure
was yet possible,--as a disease which, though it might never leave
the patient as strong as she was before, might still leave her
altogether. And as he would still have clung to his love had she been
attacked by any of those illnesses for which doctors have well-known
names, so would he cling to her now that she was attacked by a malady
for which no name was known. He had already heard from Mr Vavasor
that Alice had discovered how impossible it was that she should marry
her cousin, and, in his quiet, patient, enduring way, was beginning
to feel confident that he would, at last, carry his mistress off with
him to Nethercoats.

It was certainly a melancholy place, that signing-office, in which Mr
John Vavasor was doomed to spend twelve hours a week, during every
term time, of his existence. Whether any man could really pass an
existence of work in such a workshop, and not have gone mad,--could
have endured to work there for seven hours a day, every week-day of
his life, I am not prepared to say. I doubt much whether any victims
are so doomed. I have so often wandered through those gloomy passages
without finding a sign of humanity there,--without hearing any
slightest tick of the hammer of labour, that I am disposed to think
that Lord Chancellors have been anxious to save their subordinates
from suicide, and have mercifully decreed that the whole staff of
labourers, down to the very message boys of the office, should be
sent away to green fields or palatial clubs during, at any rate, a
moiety of their existence.

The dismal set of chambers, in which the most dismal room had been
assigned to Mr Vavasor, was not actually in Chancery Lane. Opening
off from Chancery Lane are various other small lanes, quiet, dingy
nooks, some of them in the guise of streets going no whither,
some being thoroughfares to other dingy streets beyond, in which
sponging-houses abound, and others existing as the entrances to
so-called Inns of Court,--inns of which all knowledge has for years
been lost to the outer world of the laity, and, as I believe, lost
almost equally to the inner world of the legal profession. Who has
ever heard of Symonds' Inn? But an ancestral Symonds, celebrated, no
d