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!"

And he roared again until the water oozed from his eyes.

Hope Wayne scarcely looked at him. She rose to go; but it seemed to her
pitiful to leave Fanny Newt in such utter desolation of soul and body,
in which she seemed to her to be gradually sinking into idiocy. She went
to Fanny and took her hand. Fanny listlessly rose, and when Hope had
done shaking hands Fanny crossed them before her inanely, but in an
unconsciously appealing attitude, which Hope saw and felt. Alfred still
sprawled in his chair; laughing at intervals; and Hope left the room,
followed by Fanny, who shuffled after her, her slippers, evidently down
at t