Sometimes flowers came, with Uncle Lawrence’s love.  Or fine fruit for Miss May Newt, with the same message.  Several times from her window May had seen who the messenger was:  a young man with candid eyes, with a quick step, and an open, almost boyish face.  When the street was still she heard him half-singing as he bounded along—­as nobody sings, she thought, whose home is not happy.

Solitary as a fairy princess in a tower, she looked down upon the figure as it rapidly disappeared.  The sewing or the reading stopped entirely; nor were they resumed when he had passed out of sight.  May Newt thought it strange that Uncle Lawrence should send such a messenger in the middle of the day.  He did not look like a porter.  He was not an office boy.  He was evidently one of the upper-clerks.  It was certainly very kind in Uncle Lawrence.

So thought the solitary Princess in the tower, her mind wandering from the romance she was reading to a busy speculation upon the reality in the street beneath her.

The blind was thrown partly back as she sat at the open window.  A simple airy dress, made by her own hands, covered her flower-like figure.  The brown hair was smoothed over the white temples, and the sweet girl eyes looked kindly into the street from which the figure of the young man had just passed.  If by chance the eyes of that young man had been turned upward, would he not have thought—­since one Sunday morning, when he passed her on the way to church, he was sure that she looked like an angel going home—­would he not have thought that she looked like an angel bending down toward him out of heaven?

It was not strange that Uncle Lawrence had sent him.  For somehow Uncle Lawrence had discovered that if there was any thing to go to May Newt, there was nothing in the world that Gabriel Bennet was so anxious to do as to carry it.

But while the young man was always so glad to go to Boniface Newt’s gloomy house—­for some reason which he did not explain, and which even his sister Ellen did not know—­or, at least, which she pretended not to know, although one evening that wily young girl talked with brother Gabriel about May Newt, as if she had some particular purpose in the conversation, until she seemed to have convinced herself of some hitherto doubtful point—­yet with all the willingness to go to the house, Gabriel Bennet never went to the office of Boniface Newt, Son, & Co.

If he had done so it would not have been pleasant to him, for it was perpetual field-day in the office.  A few days after Uncle Lawrence’s visit to his nephew, the senior partner sat bending his hard, anxious face over account-books and letters.  The junior partner lounged in his chair as if the office had been a club-room.  The “Company” never appeared.

“Father, I’ve just seen Sinker.”

“D——­ Sinker!”

“Come, come, father, let’s be reasonable!  Sinker says that the Canal will be a clear case of twenty per cent, per annum for ten years at least, and that we could afford to lose a cent or two upon the Bilbo iron to make it up, over and over again.”