“Did you come to propose any thing for me to do, Sir, or only to inform me that you considered me a reprobate?” asked Abel, half-sneeringly, the smoke rising from his mouth.

Lawrence Newt did not answer.

“I am like other young men,” continued Abel.  “I am fond of living well, of a good horse, of a pretty woman.  I drink my glass, and I am not afraid of a card.  Really, Uncle Lawrence, I see no such profound sin or shame in it all, so long as I honestly pay the scot.  Do I cheat at cards?  Do I lie in the gutters?”

“No!” answered Lawrence.

“Do I steal?”

“Not that I know,” said the other.

“Please, Uncle Lawrence, what do you mean, then?”

“I mean the way, the spirit in which you do things.  If you are not conscious of it, how can I make you?  I can not say more than I have.  I came merely—­”

“As a handwriting upon the wall, Uncle Lawrence?”

Lawrence Newt rose and stood a little back from the table.

“Yes, if you choose, as a handwriting on the wall.  Abel, when the prodigal son came to himself, he rose and went to his father.  I came to ask you to return to yourself.”

“From these husks, Sir?” asked Abel, as he looked around his luxurious rooms, his eye falling last upon the French print of Lucille, fresh from the bath.

Lawrence Newt looked at his nephew with profound gravity.  The young man lay back in his chair, lightly holding his cigar, and carelessly following the smoke with his eye.  The beauty and intelligence of his face, the indolent grace of his person, seen in the soft light of the lamp, and set like a picture in the voluptuous refinement of the room, touched the imagination and the heart of the older man.  There was a look of earnest, yearning entreaty in his eyes as he said,

“Abel, you remember Milton’s Comus?”

The young man bowed.

“Do you think the revelers were happy?”

Abel smiled, but did not answer.  But after a few minutes he said, with a smile,

“I was not there.”

“You are there,” answered Lawrence Newt, with uplifted finger, and in a voice so sad and clear that Abel started.

The two men looked at each other silently for a few moments.

“Good-night, Abel.”

“Good-night, Uncle Lawrence.”

The door closed behind the older man.  Abel sat in his chair, intently thinking.  His uncle’s words rang in his memory.  But as he recalled the tone, the raised finger, the mien, with which they had been spoken, the young man looked around him, and seemed half startled and frightened by the stillness, and awe-struck by the midnight hour.  He moved his head rapidly and arose, like a person trying to rouse himself from sleep or nightmare.  Passing the mirror, he involuntarily started at the haggard paleness of his face under the clustering black hair.  He was trying to shake something off.  He went