characteristics that he always impugned, or
pretended to impugn, human motive. He said
that he did not believe in an action done with a
good motive, and he would sometimes puzzle
himself by the hour together, and bewilder all his
faculties, in his endeavours to find out what
—whether in his own case or that of others—
could have been the real actuating cause of
some act which wore a fair outside, but which
he pretended must really have been performed
with a selfish intention. It was a sort of
monomania this with him, and how it originated no one
could tell, though there were those who could
not help believing that a feeling so little in
accordance with Lethwaite's real good nature
must have been generated by some act of
treachery of which he had once been the victim.

This man's nature was an uncommon one.
His unbelief as to the purity of the motives
which actuated the conduct of his fellow-men
had not by any means the effect of making him
either gloomy or morose; on the contrary. He
seemed to have made up his mind to the thing.
It was in his opinion one of the conditions of
our existence—this defectiveness of motive—
and we must just put up with it. Sometimes,
too, he would puzzle himself by the hour
together in trying to find out what could be at
the bottom of some act of courtesy of which he
had been the object. "That fellow was most
extraordinarily civil to me to-day," he would say
to himself, reflecting on the behaviour of a
certain grumpy servant who held office in his
Inn of Court—"most remarkably so. I wonder,
now, what he could have been driving at?
There must have been some reason for it, for,
ordinarily, he's a beast. I wonder what he's
after?" And so he would go on twisting and
turning the subject over in his mind, till at last
a solution would suddenly flash upon him.
"Ay, ay, ay," he would then exclaim, with
some of the joy which a hunter feels when he
has succeeded in tracking his game—"I see it
all. We are in the month of December, and
it's getting near Christmas." Such a solution
of the difficulty as this—probably in this case
the right one—would afford the keenest satisfaction
to our friend, confirming him in his theory
more fixedly than ever.

As to his own bad intentions, Mr. Lethwaite
had no sort of doubt about them. If he was
sometimes put to it to discover those of others,
being impeded by their unwillingness to come
forward openly and acknowledge them, he had
no such difficulty in his own case. Here, at any
rate, was his own heart open to him. He could
gaze down into it with piercing eyes, and hunt
among all its darkest corners for the vile traitor
who sought to avoid him. There should be no
deception here, he thought, at any rate. Alas!
there was more deception here, perhaps, than
anywhere else. Here, perhaps, were his
suspicions applied the most cruelly of all. For it
was a good heart that he injured when he
ransacked its every corner in his determination to
find out that it meant badly, and he often
deceived himself, in a manner to which most of us
are little prone, in arriving at conclusions
infinitely derogatory to his own better nature—
conclusions which made him out a perfect villain
in his own eyes.

Nor did even this habit of self-suspicion tend
altogether to sour or embitter the disposition of
this singular individual. He had made up his
mind that he was incapable of doing anything
except, at best, from a mixed motive, and he
must just bear it. If he had had an ugly nose,
he would say to himself, or if he had been marked
with the small-pox, he would not have ignored
the truth, or smashed the looking-glass that told
him of the fact; and so it should be with the
defects of his character. At least he would face
them. And he did face them, and, in doing so,
in hunting out these half-chimerical deformities
and disfigurements, he lost sight entirely of a
hundred rare and unselfish qualities which any
unprejudiced person would have been able to
point out to him.

On the morning with which we are now
concerned, Mr. Julius Lethwaite sat in his chambers
reading the newspaper after breakfast, and
expecting a visit from his confidential clerk. Mr.
Lethwaite was a good-looking, though not what
is called a handsome man. He was rather tall,
and rather thin, he had no colour, and though
his features were irregular, his was yet a
perfectly successful appearance; more so than that
of many a man who is called—and on examination
really is—handsome. He was not liable to
disastrous chances as regarded his personal
appearance—and by this it is meant that he did
not freckle, that he never had a red nose, that
he did not splutter forth into fits of laughter,
though he had a sufficiently keen sense of
humour, as was evidenced by the lines of his
mouth, and a little wrinkle near one corner of
that feature which was permanent, and very full
of expression. He was older than his friend
Gilbert by many years, and had reached years of
discretion; by which I mean that he was now
thirty-five.

The room in which our cynic was seated was an
essentially comfortable one. There were hardly
any chairs but easy ones. There were striped
Arab curtains to the windows. There were
plenty of books on the book-shelves, periodicals
and newspapers everywhere, a blazing fire, and
the remains of a very satisfactory breakfast on
the table. In one corner of the room, close to
a window, was a small table on which were all
the materials used in the trade of watch-making,
for it was one of our friend's peculiarities that he
had a great fancy for that occupation. Indeed,
he had been engaged off and on in the construction
of a watch for about eight years, and had
made nothing of it yet.

Mr. Lethwaite was sitting in a large leather
chair turned round towards the fire, and was
taking occasional doses of the newspaper, resting
between whiles to reflect; an occupation
which I can strongly recommend to those who
have got nothing to do.

"I cannot think," he said to himself, in the
course of one of these pauses, "I cannot think