There was profound silence in the room.

“I think it’s very hard,” said she, querulously.

It was useless for Lawrence to argue.  He saw it, and merely remarked,

“The house will be sold, and you’ll give up the carriage and live as plainly as you can.”

“To think of coming to this!” burst out Mrs. Newt afresh.

But a noise was heard in the hall, and the door opened to admit Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Dinks.

It was the first time they had entered her father’s house since her marriage.  May, who had been the last person Fanny had seen in her old home, ran forward to greet her, and said, cheerfully,

“Welcome home, Fanny.”

Mrs. Dinks looked defiantly about the room.  Her keen black eyes saw every body, and involuntarily every body looked at her—­except her father.  He seemed quite unconscious of any new-comers.  Alfred’s heavy figure dropped into a chair, whence his small eyes, grown sullen, stared stupidly about.  Mrs. Newt merely said, hurriedly, “Why Fanny!” and looked, from the old habit of alarm and apprehension, at her husband, then back again to her daughter.  The silence gradually became oppressive, until Fanny broke it by saying, in a dull tone,

“Oh!  Uncle Lawrence.”

He simply bowed his head, as if it had been a greeting.  Mr. Bennet’s foot twitched rather than wagged, and his wife turned toward him, from time to time, with a tender smile.  Mrs. Newt, like one at a funeral, presently began to weep afresh.

“Pleasant family party!” broke in the voice of Fanny, clear and hard as her eyes.

“Riches have wings!  Riches have wings!” repeated the gray old man, drumming with lean white fingers upon his knees.

“Will nobody tell me any thing?” said Fanny, looking sharply round.  “What’s going to be done?  Are we all beggars?”

“Riches have wings!  Riches have wings!” answered the stern voice of the old man, whose eyes were still fixed upon the wall.

Fanny turned toward him half angrily, but her black eyes quailed before the changed figure of her father.  She recalled the loud, domineering, dogmatic man, insisting, morning and night, that as soon as he was rich enough he would be all that he wanted to be—­the self-important, patronizing, cold, and unsympathetic head of the family.  Where was he?  Who was this that sat in the parlor, in his chair, no longer pompous and fierce, but bowed, gray, drumming on his thin knees with lean white fingers?

“Father!” exclaimed Fanny, involuntarily, and terrified.

The old man turned his head toward her.  The calm, hard eyes looked into hers.  There was no expression of surprise, or indignation, or forgiveness—­nothing but a placid abstraction and vagueness.

“Father!” Fanny repeated, rising, and half moving toward him.

His head turned back again—­his eyes looked at the wall—­and she heard only the words, “Riches have wings!  Riches have wings!”