“Oh!  May, don’t you love your poor Abel?”

She looked at him without speaking.  At length she said, “Where have you been?”

“I’ve been to General Belch’s,” he sobbed, in reply; “and I don’t mind Aunt Dagon, if you don’t.”

“What do you mean by that, you silly fool?” asked Mrs. Dagon, sharply.

Abel stopped and looked half angry, for a moment, but immediately fell into the old strain.

“I mean I’d just as lieve say it before her.”

“Then say it,” said May.

“Well, May, darling, couldn’t you now just coax Gabriel—­good fellow, Gabriel—­used to know him and love him at school—­couldn’t you coax him to get Uncle Lawrence to do something?”

May shook her head.  Abel began to snivel.

“I don’t mean for the house.  D——­n it, that’s gone to smash.  I mean for myself.  May, for your poor brother Abel.  You might just try.”

He lay back and looked at her ruefully.

“Aunt Dagon,” she said, quietly, “we had better go out of the room.  Abel, don’t you come up stairs while you are in this state.  I know all that Uncle Lawrence has done for father and you, and he will do nothing more.  Do you expect him to pay your gambling debts?” she asked, indignantly.

Abel raised himself fiercely, while the bad blackness filled his eyes.

“D——­d old hunks!” he shouted.

But nobody heard.  Mrs. Dagon and May Newt had closed the door, and Abel was left alone.

“It’s no use,” he said, moodily and aloud, but still thickly.  “I can’t help it.  I shall have to do just as Belch wishes.  But he must help me.  If he expects me to serve him, he must serve me.  He says he can—­buy off—­Bodley—­and then—­why, then—­devil take it!” he said, vacantly, with heavy eyes, “then—­then—­oh yes!” He smiled a maudlin smile.  “Oh yes!  I shall be a great—­a great—­great—­man—­I’ll be—­rep—­rep—­sentive—­ofs—­ofs—­dear pe—­pe.”

His head fell like a lump upon the cushion of the sofa, and he breathed heavily, until the solemn, dark, formal parlor smelled like a bar-room.

CHAPTER LXIII.

ENDYMION.

Lawrence Newt had told Aunt Martha that he preferred to hear from a young woman’s own lips that she loved him.  Was he suspicious of the truth of Aunt Martha’s assertion?

When the Burt will was read, and Fanny Dinks had hissed her envy and chagrin, she had done more than she would willingly have done:  she had said that all the world knew he was in love with Hope Wayne.  If all the world knew it, then surely Amy Waring did; “and if she did, was it so strange,” he thought, “that she should have said what she did to me?”

He thought often of these things.  But one of the days when he sat in his office, and the junior partner was engaged in writing the letters which formerly Lawrence wrote, the question slid into his mind as brightly, but as softly and benignantly, as daylight into the sky.