"I shall have to turn round a bit, sir--I shall have to look about
me," he said; and then he added indulgently, magnanimously: "If
you should happen to hear of anything for me--"

I couldn't let him finish; this was, in its essence, too much in
the really grand manner. It would be a help to my getting him off
my mind to be able to pretend I COULD find the right place, and
that help he wished to give me, for it was doubtless painful to him
to see me in so false a position. I interposed with a few words to
the effect of how well aware I was that wherever he should go,
whatever he should do, he would miss our old friend terribly--miss
him even more than I should, having been with him so much more.
This led him to make the speech that has remained with me as the
very text of the whole episode.

"Oh sir, it's sad for YOU, very sad indeed, and for a great many
gentlemen and ladies; that it is, sir. But for me, sir, it is, if
I may say so, still graver even than that: it's just the loss of
something that was everything. For me, sir," he went on with
rising tears, "he was just ALL, if you know what I mean, sir. You
have others, sir, I daresay--not that I would have you understand
me to speak of them as in any way tantamount. But you have the
pleasures of society, sir; if it's only in talking about him, sir,
as I daresay you do freely--for all his blest memory has to fear
from it--with gentlemen and ladies who have had the same honour.
That's not for me, sir, and I've to keep my associations to myself.
Mr. Offord was MY society, and now, you see, I just haven't any.
You go back to conversation, sir, after all, and I go back to my
place," Brooksmith stammered, without exaggerated irony or dramatic
bitterness, but with a flat unstudied veracity and his hand on the