Mrs. Newt was dissolved in tears.  She shook her head weakly, and rubbed her hands.

“Oh!  Aunt Dagon, it’s dreadful to see him.  He don’t seem himself.  He does nothing but sit at the table and drum with his fingers; and in the night he lies awake, thinking.  And, oh dear!” she said, giving way to a sudden burst of grief, “he doesn’t scold at any thing.”

Mrs. Dagon listened and reflected.

“My dear,” she asked, “has he settled any thing upon you?”

“Nothing,” replied Mrs. Newt.

“Aunt Dagon,” said May, who sat by, looking at the old lady, “we are now poor people.  We shall sell this house, and go and live in a small way out of sight.”

“Fiddle, diddle! my dear,” returned Mrs. Dagon, warmly; “you’ll do no such thing.  Poor people, indeed!  Why, May, you know nothing about these things.  Failing, failing; why, my dear, that’s nothing.  A New York merchant expects to fail, just as an English lord expects to have the gout.  It isn’t exactly a pleasant thing, but it’s extremely respectable.  Every body fails.  It’s understood.”

“What’s understood?” asked May.

“Why, that business is a kind of game, and that every body runs for luck.  Oh, I know all about it, my dear!  It’s all a string of cards—­as Colonel Burr used to say; and I think if any body knew the world he did—­it’s all a string of blocks.  B trusts A, C trusts B, D trusts C, and so on.  A tumbles over, and down go B, and C, and D. That’s the whole of it, my dear.  Colonel Burr used to say that his rule was to keep himself just out of reach of any other block.  If they knock me over, my dear Miss Bunley, he once said to me—­ah!  May, what a voice he said it in, what an eye!—­if they knock me over, I shall be so busy picking myself up that I shall be forced to be selfish, and can’t help them, so I had better keep away, and then I can be of some service.  That was Colonel Burr’s principle.  He declared it was the only way in which you could be sure of helping others.  People talk about Colonel Burr.  My dear, Colonel Burr was a man who minded his own business.”

May Newt held her tongue.  She felt instinctively that a woman of sixty-five, who had been trained by Colonel Burr, was not very likely to accept the opinions of a girl of her years.  Mrs. Newt was feebly rocking herself during the conversation between her daughter and aunt; and when they had finished said, despairingly,

“Dear me! what will people say?  Oh!  I can’t go and live poor.  I’m not used to it.  I don’t know how.”

“Live poor!” sniffed Mrs. Dagon; “of course you won’t live poor.  I’ve heard Boniface say often enough that it was too bad, but it was a world of good-for-nothing people; and you don’t think he’s going to let good-for-nothing people drive him from a becoming style of living?  Fiddle!  I’d like to see him undertake to live poor.”

“Do you think people will come to see us?” gasped Mrs. Newt.