Mr Harding was shown into a comfortable inner sitting-room, looking more like a gentleman’s book-room than a lawyer’s chambers, and there waited for Sir Abraham. Nor was he kept waiting long: in ten or fifteen minutes he heard a clatter of voices speaking quickly in the passage, and then the attorney-general entered.

‘Very sorry to keep you waiting, Mr Warden,’ said Sir Abraham, shaking hands with him; ‘and sorry, too, to name so disagreeable an hour; but your notice was short, and as you said today, I named the very earliest hour that was not disposed of.’

Mr Harding assured him that he was aware that it was he that should apologise.

Sir Abraham was a tall thin man, with hair prematurely gray, but bearing no other sign of age; he had a slight stoop, in his neck rather than his back, acquired by his constant habit of leaning forward as he addressed his various audiences. He might be fifty years old, and would have looked young for his age, had not constant work hardened his features, and given him the appearance of a machine with a mind. His face was full of intellect, but devoid of natural expression. You would say he was a man to use, and then have done with; a man to be sought for on great emergencies, but ill-adapted for ordinary services; a man whom you would ask to defend your property, but to whom you would be sorry to confide your love. He was bright as a diamond, and as cutting, and also as unimpressionable. He knew everyone whom to know was an honour, but he was without a friend; he wanted none, however, and knew not the meaning of the word in other than its parliamentary sense. A friend! Had he not always been sufficient to himself, and now, at fifty, was it likely that he should trust another? He was married, indeed, and had children, but what time had he for the soft idleness of conjugal felicity? His working days or term times were occupied from his time of rising to the late hour at which he went to rest, and even his vacations were more full of labour than the busiest days of other men. He never quarrelled with his wife, but he never talked to her — he never had time to talk, he was so taken up with speaking. She, poor lady, was not unhappy; she had all that money could give her, she would probably live to be a peeress, and she really thought Sir Abraham the best of husbands.

Sir Abraham was a man of wit, and sparkled among the brightest at the dinner-tables of political grandees: indeed, he always sparkled; whether in society, in the House of Commons, or the courts of law, coruscations flew from him; glittering sparkles, as from hot steel, but no heat; no cold heart was ever cheered by warmth from him, no unhappy soul ever dropped a portion of its burden at his door.

With him success alone was praiseworthy, and he knew none so successful as himself. No one had thrust him forward; no powerful friends had pushed him along on his road to power. No; he was attorney-general, and would, in all human probability, be lord chancellor by sheer dint of his own industry and his own talent. Who else in all the world rose so high with so little help? A premier, indeed! Who had ever been premier without mighty friends? An archbishop! Yes, the son or grandson of a great noble, or else, probably, his tutor. But he, Sir Abraham, had had no mighty lord at his back; his father had been a country apothecary, his mother a farmer’s daughter. Why should he respect any but himself? And so he glitters along through the world, the brightest among the bright; and when his glitter is gone, and he is gathered to his fathers, no eye will be dim with a tear, no heart will mourn for its lost friend.

‘And so, Mr Warden,’ said Sir Abraham, ‘all our trouble about this lawsuit is at an end.’

Mr Harding said he hoped so, but he didn’t at all understand what Sir Abraham meant. Sir Abraham, with all his sharpness, could not have looked into his heart and read his intentions.

‘All over. You need trouble yourself no further about it; of course they must pay the costs, and the absolute expense to you and Dr Grantly will be trifling — that is, compared with what it might have been if it had been continued.’

‘I fear I don’t quite understand you, Sir Abraham.’

‘Don’t you know that their attorneys have noticed us that they have withdrawn the suit?’

Mr Harding explained to the lawyer that he knew nothing of this, although he had heard in a roundabout way that such an intention had been talked of; and he also at length succeeded in making Sir Abraham understand that even this did not satisfy him. The attorney-general stood up, put his hands into his breeches’ pockets, and raised his eyebrows, as Mr Harding proceeded to detail the grievance from which he now wished to rid himself.

‘I know I have no right to trouble you personally with this matter, but as it is of most vital importance to me, as all my happiness is concerned in it, I thought I might venture to seek your advice.’

Sir Abraham bowed, and declared his clients were entitled to the best advice he could give them; particularly a client so respectable in every way as the Warden of Barchester Hospital.

‘A spoken word, Sir Abraham, is often of more value than volumes of written advice. The truth is, I am ill-satisfied with this matter as it stands at present. I do see — I cannot help seeing, that the affairs of the hospital are not arranged according to the will of the founder.’

‘None of such institutions are, Mr Harding, nor can they be; the altered circumstances in which we live do not admit of it.’

‘Quite true — that is quite true; but I can’t see that those altered circumstances give me a right to eight hundred a year. I don’t know whether I ever read John Hiram’s will, but were I to read it now I could not understand it. What I want you, Sir Abraham, to tell me, is this — am I, as warden, legally and distinctly entitled to the proceeds of the property, after the due maintenance of the twelve bedesmen?’

Sir Abraham declared that he couldn’t exactly say in so many words that Mr Harding was legally entitled to, &c., &c., &c., and ended in expressing a strong opinion that it would be madness to raise any further question on the matter, as the suit was to be — nay, was, abandoned. Mr Harding, seated in his chair, began to play a slow tune on an imaginary violoncello.

‘Nay, my dear sir,’ continued the attorney-general, ‘there is no further ground for any question; I don’t see that you have the power of raising it.’

‘I can resign,’ said Mr Harding, slowly playing away with his right hand, as though the bow were beneath the chair in which he was sitting.

‘What! throw it up altogether?’ said the attorney-general, gazing with utter astonishment at his ............