One evening, however, in late September, he happened to look in toward nine o'clock, the hour when the frugal supper was generally spread. The usual occupants of the room were there, but there was no supper on the table, and the landlady was absent.
Harry stood in the doorway, with his hands in his pockets, carelessly looking at the group. Suddenly he became aware, with a curious sinking of heart, that something was gone wrong with all of them. They were all silent, all sitting bolt upright, no one taking the least notice of his neighbor, and all apparently in some physical pain.
The illustrious pair were in their usual places, but his lordship, instead of looking sleepy and sleepily content, as was his custom at the evening hour, sat bolt upright and thrummed the arm of his chair with his fingers, restless and ill at ease; opposite to him sat his consort, her hands tightly clasped, her bright beady eyes gleaming with impatience, which might at any moment break out into wrath. Yet the case was completely drawn up, as Harry knew, because he had finished it himself, and it only remained to make a clean copy before it was "sent in" to the Lord Chancellor.
As for the professor, he was seated at the window, his legs curled under the chair, looking moodily across Stepney Green--into space, and neglecting his experiments. His generally cheerful face wore an anxious expression as if he was thinking of something unpleasant, which would force itself upon his attention.
Josephus was in his corner, without his pipe, and more than usually melancholy. His sadness always, however, increased in the evening, so that he hardly counted.
Daniel, frowning like a Rhine baron of the good old time, had his books before him, but they were closed. It was a bad sign that even the Version in the Hebrew had no attraction for him.
Mr. Maliphant alone was smiling. His smiles, in such an assemblage of melancholy faces, produced an incongruous effect. The atmosphere was charged with gloom--it was funereal: in the midst of it the gay and cheerful countenance, albeit wrinkled, of the old man, beamed like the sun impertinently shining amid fog and rain, sleet and snow. The thing was absurd. Harry felt the force of Miss Kennedy's remark that the occupants of the room reminded her of a fortuitous concourse of flies, or ants, or rooks, or people in an omnibus, each of whom was profoundly occupied with its own affairs and careless of its neighbors. Out of six in the room, five were unhappy: they did not ask for, or expect, the sympathies of their neighbors; they did not reveal their anxieties; they sat and suffered in silence; the sixth alone was quite cheerful: it was nothing to him what experiences the rest were having, whether they were enjoying the upper airs, or enduring hardness. He sat in his own place near the professor: he laughed aloud; he even talked and told stories, to which no one listened. When Harry appeared, he was just ending a story which he had never begun: