“Just let things be a while,” was Solomon’s reply, “and mind your own business.  It is quite true the lad’s throwing my money in the gutter at a fine rate; but in the end I shall get it all back again, and more with it.  This Balfour takes me for a foolish doting father, but he shall pay for all himself before I’ve done with him.  I throw a sprat to catch a whale; and neither you nor any other fool shall interfere with my fishing.”

Harry dared not say more; her husband had been in the worst of humors ever since he had returned from Crompton, and was all the more brutal and tyrannical to her that he had to be civil and conciliatory to his new friend, and involuntarily indulgent, upon his account, to Charles.  The unhappy mother was powerless to check the evil the growth of which was so patent to her loving instinct, and there was none to whom she could look for help.  Mrs. Basil had no longer any influence with Solomon, and, besides, she was seriously ill, and had now been confined to her own room for weeks.  In her extremity, Harry had even resolved to make a personal appeal to this man Balfour; to ask him in what her husband had injured him, to adjure him to forgive the wrong, or at least not to visit it upon her Charley’s innocent head.  But she shrank with an inexplicable terror from putting this design into effect; she felt she should humiliate herself to no purpose; he would deny, in his cold, cynical way, that he entertained any thing but friendship for her astute husband and affection for her bright and impulsive son.  Besides, to say truth, she was afraid to speak with the man; and she had a suspicion that this weird and shadowy fear was in some degree shared by Mrs. Basil; at times she even imagined that it was not so much indisposition as a desire to avoid his presence that caused the landlady to absent herself from the family circle.

Mr. Coe, at all events, entertained no such prejudice against his guest; day by day he grew more communicative with him, and more solicitous to hear his opinions, with which he seldom failed to agree.  The two men were in reality, as it was easy to see, as opposite in character as the poles.  Mr. Balfour was, and apparently always had been, a man of pleasure; but he had seen men and cities, and his remarks were shrewd, and selfish, and worldly-wise enough.  It was rarely that his talk ever strayed to matters of business, so that Solomon was perforce a listener; but that unambitious part he played to admiration.

Upon one occasion, however, their after-dinner converse happened to turn upon partnerships; Solomon urged their great convenience, how one man brought money and the other brains, and how pleasant it must be for the former to live at ease while the latter gathered honey for him, both for present use and for the wintry store.  He rose with the familiar subject to quite a flight of poetry.

Mr. Balfour, with half-shut eves and a mocking smile, dilated upon the sentiment involved in such communities of enterprise, the sympathy engendered by them, and the happy social effects that were produced by them.  His host either did not, or would not, perceive that these remarks were ironical, and pursued the subject to its details, proportions of profits, balance-sheets, etc., until Charles rose with a yawn, and left his two elders together.