ness was, and so tumbled into bed and fell
asleep. And as he dreamed, Hope Wayne came to him and smiled, as Diana
smiled in his picture upon Endymion.

"See!" she said, "I love you; look here!"

And in his dream he looked and saw a full moon in a summer sky shining
upon a fresh grave upon a hill-top.

CHAPTER LXXXI.

MRS. ALFRED DINKS AT HOME.

A new element had forced itself into the life of Hope Wayne, and that
was the fate of Abel Newt. There was something startling in the direct,
passionate, personal appeal he had made to her. She put on her bonnet and
furs, for it was Christmas time, and passed the Bowery into the small,
narrow street where the smell of the sewer was the chief odor and the few
miserable trees cooped up in perforated boxes had at last been released
from suffering, and were placidly, rigidly dead.

The sloppy servant girl was standing upon the area steps with her apron
over her head, and blowing her huge red fingers, staring at every thing,
and apparently stunned when Hope Wayne stopped and went up the steps.
Hope rang, entered the little parlor and seated herself upon the
haircloth sofa. Her heart ached with the dreariness of the house; but
while she was resolving that she would certainly raise her secret
allowance to her Cousin Alfred, whether her good friend Lawrence Newt
approved of it or not, she saw that the dreariness was not in the small
room or the hair sofa, nor in the two lamps with glass drops upon the
mantle, but in the lack of that indescribable touch of feminine taste,
and tact, and tenderness, which create comfort and grace wherever they
fall, and make the most desolate chambers to blossom with cheerfulness.
Hope felt as she glanced around her that money could not buy what was
wanting.

Mrs. Alfred Dinks presently entered. Hope Wayne had rarely met her since
the season at Saratoga when Fanny had captured her prize. She saw that
the black-eyed, clever, resolute girl of those days had grown larger and
more pulpy, and was wrapped in a dingy morning wrapper. Her hair was not
smooth, her hands were not especially clean; she had that dull
carelessness, or unconsciousness of personal appearance, which seemed
to Hope only the parlor aspect of the dowdiness that had run entirely
to seed in the sloppy servant girl upon the area steps.

Hope Wayne put out her hand, which Fanny listlessly took. There was
nothing very hard, or ferocious, or defiant in her manner, as Hope had
expe