“He lives at the old place in Grand Street, I believe; the Lord knows how; I’m sure I don’t.  I suppose he gambles when he isn’t drunk.”

“But about Congress?” inquired Hope.

“I don’t know any thing about that.  Abel and father used to say that no gentleman would ever have any thing to do with politics; so I never heard any thing, and I’m sure I don’t know what he’s going to do.”

Fanny apparently supposed her last remark would end the conversation.  Not that she wished to end it—­not that she was sorry to see Hope Wayne again and to talk with her—­not that she wanted or cared for any thing in particular, no, not even for her lord and master, who burst into the room with an oath, as usual, and with his small, swinish eyes heavy with drowsiness.

The master of the house was evidently just down.  He wore a dirty morning-gown, and slippers down at the heel, displaying his dirty stockings.  He came in yawning and squeezing his eves together.

“Why the h——­ don’t that slut of a waiter have my coffee ready?” he said to his wife, who paid no more attention to him than to the lamp on the mantle, but, on the contrary, appeared to Hope to be a little more indifferent than before.

“I say, why the h——­” Mr. Dinks began again, and had advanced so far when he suddenly saw his cousin.

“Hallo! what are you doing here?” he said to her abruptly, and in the half-sycophantic, half-bullying tone that indicates the feeling of such a man toward a person to whom he is under immense obligation.  Alfred Dinks’s real feeling was that Hope Wayne ought to give him a much larger allowance.

Hope was inexpressibly disgusted; but she found an excitement in encountering this boorishness, which served to stimulate her in the struggle going on in her own soul.  And she very soon understood how the sharp, sparkling, audacious Fanny Newt had become the inert, indifferent woman before her.  A clever villain might have developed her, through admiration and sympathy, into villainy; but a dull, heavy brute merely crushed her.  There is a spur in the prick of a rapier; only stupidity follows the blow of a club.

After sitting silently for some minutes, during which Alfred Dinks sprawled in a chair, and yawned, and whistled insolently to himself, while Fanny sat without looking at him, as if she were deaf and dumb, Hope Wayne said to the husband and wife: 

“Abel Newt is ruining himself, and he may harm other people.  If there is any thing that can be done to save him we ought to do it.  Fanny, he is your own flesh and blood.”

She spoke with a kind of despairing earnestness, for Hope herself felt how useless every thing would probably be.  But when she had ended Alfred broke out into uproarious laughter,

“Ho! ho! ho!  Ho! ho! ho!”

He made such a noise that even his wife looked at him with almost a glance of contempt.

“Save Abel Newt!” cried he.  “Convert the Devil!  Yes, yes; let’s send him some tracts!  Ho! ho! ho!”