Gridley, who, as we were saying, had just been called down to tea by Miss
Susan Posey.

"I am coming, my dear," he said,--which expression quite touched Miss
Susan, who did not know that it was a kind of transferred caress from the
delicious page he was reading. It was not the living child that was
kissed, but the dead one lying under the snow, if we may make a trivial
use of a very sweet and tender thought we all remember.

Not long after this, happening to call in at the lawyer's office, his eye
was caught by the corner of a book lying covered up by a pile of papers.
Somehow or other it seemed to look very natural to him. Could that be a
copy of "Thoughts on the Universe"? He watched his opportunity, and got
a hurried sight of the volume. His own treatise, sure enough! Leaves
Uncut. Opened of itself to the one hundred and twentieth page. The
axiom Murray Bradshaw had quoted--he did not remember from
what,--"sounded like Coleridge"--was staring him in the face from that
very page. When he remembered how he had pleased himself with that
compliment the other day, he blushed like a school-girl; and then,
thinking out the whole trick,--to hunt up his forgotten book, pick out a
phrase or two from it, and play on his weakness with it, to win his good
opinion,--for what purpose he did not know, but doubtless to use him in
some way,--he grinned with a contempt about equally divided between
himself and the young schemer.

"Ah ha!" he muttered scornfully. "Sounds like Coleridge, hey? Niccolo
Macchiavelli Bradshaw!"

From this day forward he looked on all the young lawyer's doings with
even more suspicion than before. Yet he would not forego his company and