While May went up stairs to find Fanny, Gabriel Bennet looked and smelled around him.  He had not believed that a human home could be so dismal, and he could not understand how haircloth furniture and dimness could make it so.  His father’s house was certainly not very large; and it was scantily and plainly furnished, but no Arabian palace had ever seemed so splendid to his imagination as that home was dear to his heart.  No, it isn’t the furniture nor the smell, thought he.  I am quite sure it is something that I neither see nor smell that makes the difference.

As he sat on the uncomfortable sofa and heard the jangling bells of the ragman die away into the distance, and the loud, long, mournful whoop of the chimney-sweep, his fancy was busy with the figures of a thousand things that might be—­of a certain nameless somebody, mistress of that poor, sombre house, but so lighting it up with grace and gay sweetness that the hard sofa became the most luxurious lounge, and the cheap table more gorgeous than ormolu; and of a certain other nameless somebody coming home at evening—­an opening door—­a rustle in the hall as of women’s robes—­a singular sound as of meeting lips—­then a coming together arm in arm into the dingy furnished little parlor, but with such a bright fire blazing under the wooden mantle—­and then—­and then—­a pattering of little feet down the stairs—­Hem! hem! said Gabriel Bennet, clearing his throat, as if to arouse himself by making a noise.  For there was a sound of feet upon the stairs, and the next moment May and her sister Fanny entered the room.  Gabriel rose and bowed, and held out his hand.  Mrs. Alfred Dinks said, “How do you do?” and seated herself without taking the hand.

Time had not softened her face, but sharpened it, and her eyes were of a fierce blackness.  She looked forty years old; and there was a permanent frown of her dark brows.

“So this silly May is going to marry you?” said she, addressing Gabriel.

Surprised by this kind of congratulation, but also much amused by it, as if there could be nothing so ludicrous as the idea of May not marrying a man who loved her as he loved, Gabriel gravely responded,

“Yes, ma’am, she is set upon it.”

Fanny Newt, who had seated herself with an air of utter and chronic contempt and indifference, and who looked away from Gabriel the moment she had spoken to him, now turned toward him again suddenly with an expression like that of an animal which pricks up his ears.  The keen fire of the old days shot for a moment into her eyes, for it was the first word of badinage or humor that Fanny Newt had heard for a long, long time.

“A woman who is such a fool as to marry ought to be unhappy,” she replied, with her eyes fixed upon Gabriel.

“A man who persuades her to do it ought to be taken out and hung,” answered he, with aphoristic gravity.

Fanny was perplexed.

“Better to be the slave of a parent than a husband,” she continued.