and possibly a sanctified future; but the ungovernable flames of sin had reduced him, like that darkened and desecrated fane, to a melancholy mass of ashy arches and blackened columns, where ministering priests, all holy aspirations, slumbered in the dust.  His dress was costly but negligent, and the red stain on his jacket told that his hunt had not been fruitless.  He wore a straw hat, belted with broad black ribbon, and his spurred boots were damp and muddy.

What was there about this surly son of her hostess which recalled to Edna’s mind her grandfather’s words, “He is a rude, wicked, blasphemous man.”  She had not distinctly seen the face of the visitor at the shop; but something in the impatient, querulous tone, in the hasty, haughty step, and the proud lifting of the regal head, reminded her painfully of him whose overbearing insolence had so unwontedly stirred the ire of Aaron Hunt’s genial and generally equable nature.  While she pondered this inexplicable coincidence, voices startled her from the next room, whence the sound floated through the window.

“If you were not my mother, I should say you were a candidate for a straight-jacket and a lunatic asylum; but as those amiable proclivities are considered hereditary, I do not favor that comparison.  ‘Sorry for her,’ indeed!  I’ll bet my right arm it will not be six weeks before she makes you infinitely sorrier for your deluded self; and you will treat me to a new version of ’je me regrette!’ With your knowledge of this precious world and its holy crew, I confess it seems farcical in the extreme that open-eyed you can venture another experiment on human nature.  Some fine morning you will rub your eyes and find your acolyte non est; ditto, your silver forks, diamonds, and gold spoons.”

Edna felt the indignant blood burning in her cheeks, and as she could not walk without assistance, and shrank from listening to a conversation which was not intended for her ears, she coughed several times to arrest the attention of the speakers, but apparently without effect, for the son’s voice again rose above the low tones of the mother.

“Oh, carnival of shams!  She is ‘pious’ you say?  Then, I’ll swear my watch is not safe in my pocket, and I shall sleep with the key of my cameo cabinet tied around my neck.  A Paris police would not insure your valuables or mine.  The facts forbid that your pen-feathered saint should decamp with some of my costly travel-scrapings!  ‘Pious’ indeed!  ‘Edna,’ forsooth!  No doubt her origin and morals are quite as apocryphal as her name.  Don’t talk to me about ’her being providentially thrown into your hands,’ unless you desire to hear me say things which you have frequently taken occasion to inform me ‘deeply grieved’ you.  I dare say the little vagrant whines in what she considers orthodox phraseology, that ’God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb!’ and, like some other pious people whom I have heard canting, will saddle some Jewish prophet or fisherman with the dictum, thinking that it sounds like the Bible, whereas Sterne said it.  Shorn lamb, forsooth!  We, or rather you, madame, ma mere, will be shorn—­thoroughly fleeced!  Pious!  Ha! ha! ha!”