The change that came over it was so sudden and so awful in its nature, that the old clerk started back as if he had seen a ghost.
"You are going to meet him?" said Joseph, in a hoarse whisper; "he is in England, then?"
"No; but he is expected to arrive almost immediately. Why do you look like that, Joseph?"
"Why do I look like that?" cried the younger man; "have you grown to be such a mere machine, such a speaking automaton, such a living tool of the men you serve, that all human feeling has perished in your breast? Bah! how should such as you understand what I feel? Hark! the bell's ringing—I'll come with you."
The train was on the point of starting: the two men hurried out to the platform.
"No,—no," cried Sampson Wilmot, as his brother stepped after him into the carriage; "no,—no, Joseph, don't come with me,—don't come with me!"
"I will go with you."
"But you've no ticket."
"I can get one—or you can get me one, for I've no money—at the first station we stop at."
They were seated in a second-class railway carriage by this time. The ticket-collector, running from carriage to carriage, was in too great a hurry to discover that the little bit of pasteboard which Joseph Wilmot exhibited was only a return-ticket to Wandsworth. There was a brief scramble, a banging of doors, and Babel-like confusion of tongues; and then the engine gave its farewell shriek and rushed away.