Winter again; the city dull, listless and sodden of aspect in the gloom of a January evening.  In the country, and nature’s quiet places, the dusk was throwing a veil over the cheerlessness of earth, as a friend covers a friend’s deficiencies with love; but here, in the haunts of men, garish electric lights made plain the misery.  The air was a depressing compound which defied analysis; but was apparently composed of equal parts of snow, drizzle, and stinging sleet; the wind caught it in sudden whirls, and dashed it around corners and into the eyes and the coat collars of wayfarers with gusty malevolence.

The streets were comparatively deserted, only such people being abroad as could not help themselves, and these plodded along with bent heads, and silent curses on the night.  Even the poor creatures who daily “till the field of human sympathy” kept close within the shelter of four walls, no matter how forlorn, and left the elements to hold Walpurgis night in the thoroughfares alone.

In a comfortable easy chair, in the handsome parlor of an elegant up-town mansion, sat Ethel Cumberland, reading a novel.  Since her second marriage, life had gone pleasantly with her and she was content.  Cecil never worried her about things beyond her comprehension, or required other aliments for his spiritual sustenance than that which she was able and willing to furnish; he was a commonplace man and his desires were commonplace—­easily understood and satisfied.  He liked a pretty wife, a handsome house, a good dinner with fine wine and jolly company; he liked high-stepping horses, a natty turn-out, and the smile of Vanity Fair.  Ethel’s tastes were similar, and their lives so far had fitted into each other without a single crevice.  The Cumberlands were grim and unbending, it is true, and after that one concession to fraternal feeling, made no more; they held themselves rigidly aloof from the pair, and invested all intercourse with paralyzing formality.  Ethel did not care a pin for them or their opinion; if they chose to be old-fogyish and disagreeable, they were quite welcome to indulge their fancy.  As long as society smiled upon her, Madam Ethel was superbly indifferent to the Cumberland frown.

Cecil worried over it, as men will worry, who have been accustomed to the adulation of their womenkind, when that adulation is withdrawn.  He grumbled and fumed over their “damned nonsense,” as he called it, and bored his wife no little with conjectures as to their reasons for being stiff and unpleasant when nobody else was.

Since her return from her wedding trip, which had lengthened to four months amid the delights of Paris, Mrs. Cumberland had found time for only one short visit to her little son.  There had been such an accumulation of social duties and engagements, that pilgrimages over to Brooklyn were out of the question; and besides, she disliked Mrs. Creswell, Thorne’s aunt, who had charge of the boy, and