So I should have gone on till now, but that my room
had a thin wall. You can tell your sister that it was divided from the
Manager's room by a wainscot partition.'
'They were adjoining rooms; had been one, Perhaps, originally; and
were separated, as Mr Morfin says,' said her brother, looking back to
him for the resumption of his explanation.
'I have whistled, hummed tunes, gone accurately through the whole
of Beethoven's Sonata in B,' to let him know that I was within
hearing,' said Mr Morfin; 'but he never heeded me. It happened seldom
enough that I was within hearing of anything of a private nature,
certainly. But when I was, and couldn't otherwise avoid knowing
something of it, I walked out. I walked out once, John, during a
conversation between two brothers, to which, in the beginning, young
Walter Gay was a party. But I overheard some of it before I left the
room. You remember it sufficiently, perhaps, to tell your sister what
its nature was?'
'It referred, Harriet,' said her brother in a low voice, 'to the
past, and to our relative positions in the House.'
'Its matter was not new to me, but was presented in a new aspect.
It shook me in my habit - the habit of nine-tenths of the world - of
believing that all was right about me, because I was used to it,' said
their visitor; 'and induced me to recall the history of the two
brothers, and to ponder on it.
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