"Hate it, Jack?" (Much bewildered.)
"I hate it. The cramped monotony of my existence grinds me away by the grain. How does our service sound to you?"
"Beautiful! Quite celestial."
"It often sounds to me quite devilish. I am so weary of it The echoes of my own voice among the arches seem to mock me with my daily drudging round. No wretched monk who droned his life away in that gloomy place, before me, can have been more tired of it than I am. He could take for relief (and did take) to carving demons out of the stalls and seats and desks. What shall I do? Must I take to carving them out of my heart?"
"I thought you had so exactly found your niche in life, Jack," Edwin Drood returns, astonished, bending forward in his chair to lay a sympathetic hand on Jasper's knee, and looking at him with an anxious face.
"I know you thought so. They all think so."
"Well; I suppose they do," says Edwin, meditating aloud. "Pussy thinks so."
"When did she tell you that?"
"The last time I was here. You remember when. Three months ago."
"How did she phrase it?"
"Oh! She only said that she had become your pupil, and that you were made for your vocation."
The younger man glances at the portrait. The elder sees it in him.
"Anyhow, my dear Ned," Jasper resumes, as he shakes his head with a grave cheerfulness: "I must subdue myself to my vocation: which is much the same thing outwardly. It's too late to find another now. This is a confidence between us."
"It shall be sacredly preserved, Jack."
"I have reposed it in you, because——"
"I feel it, I assure you. Because we are fast friends, and because you love and trust me, as I love and trust you. Both hands, Jack."
As each stands looking into the other's eyes, and as the uncle holds the nephew's hands, the uncle thus proceeds:
"You know now, don't you, that even a poor monotonous chorister and grinder of music—in his niche—may be troubled with some stray sort of ambition, aspiration, restlessness, dissatisfaction, what shall we call it?"
"Yes, dear Jack."
"And you will remember?"
"My dear Jack, I only ask you, am I likely to forget what you have said with so much feeling?"
"Take it as a warning, then."
In the act of having his hands released, and of moving a step back, Edwin pauses for an instant to consider the application of these last words. The instant over, he says, sensibly touched:
"I am afraid I am but a shallow, surface kind of fellow. Jack, and that my headpiece is none of the best. But I needn't say I am young; and perhaps I shall not grow worse as I grow older.
