, my heart will----"
[Her tears can as readily be understood as his interjections.]

If a domestic railroad could have been cleverly constructed to Maria's
chamber from every room in that great house, it would have stood her in
good stead; for every day, from some room or other, this poor girl of
feeling had to rush up stairs in a torrent of grief. Yearning after
sympathy and love, neither felt nor understood by the minds with whom
she herded, a trio of worldliness, apathy, and coarse brutality, her
bosom ached as an empty void: treated with habitual neglect and cold
indifference, made various (as occasion might present) by stern rebuke
or bitter sarcasm, her heart was sore within its cell, and the poor dear
child lived a life of daily martyrdom, her feelings smitten upon the
desecrated altar of home by the "foes of her own household."

And not least hostile in the band of those home-foes was this only
brother, John. Look at him as he stands alone there, muttering after her
as she ran up stairs, "Plague take the girl!" and let me tell you what I
know of him.

That thick-set form, with its pock-marked face, imprisons as base a
spirit as Baal's. He was a chip of the old block, and something more. If
the father had a heart with "gold" written on it, the son had no heart
at all, but gold was in its place. Thoroughly unscrupulous as to ways
and means, and simply acting on the phrase "_quocunque modo rem_," he
seemed to have neither conscience of evil, nor dread of danger. In two
words, he was a "bold bad" man, divested equally of fear and feeling.
The memoirs of his past life hitherto, without controversy very little
edifying, may be guessed with quite sufficient accuracy for all
characteristic purposes from the coarse, sensual, worldly, and
iniquitous result now standing for his portraiture before us. We will
waste on such a type of heartlessness as few words as possible: let his
conduct show the man.

Just now, this worthy had risen into high favour with his father: we
already know why; he had suddenly got rich on his own account, and for
that very sufficient reason drew any additional sums he pleased on "the
governor's." The trick or two, whereat Sir Thomas hinted, and which so
wise a man would not have blabbed to fools, are worthy of record; not
merely as illustrative of character, but (in one case at least, as we
may find hereafter) for the sake of ulterior consequences.

John Dillaway's first exploit in the money-