knowing
the while that Maud certainly would.

His brother's letter, though most satisfactory as regarded its main
point, put Mr. Tapster out of conceit with the rest of his dinner; so he
rang twice and had the table cleared, frowning at the parlor-maid as she
hurried through her duties, and yet not daring to rebuke her for having
neglected to answer the bell the first time he rang. After a pause, he
rose and turned toward the door--but no, he could not face the large,
cheerless drawing-room up-stairs; instead, he sat down by the fire, and
set himself to consider his future and, in a more hazy sense, that of
his now motherless children.

But very soon, as generally happens to those who devote any time to that
least profitable of occupations, Mr. Tapster found that his thoughts
drifted aimlessly, not to the future where he would have them be, but to
the past--that past which he desired to forget, to obliterate from his
memory.

Till rather more than a year ago few men of his age--he had then been
sixty, he was now sixty-one--enjoyed a pleasanter and, from his own
point of view, a better filled life than James Tapster. How he had
scorned the gambler, the spendthrift, the adulterer--in a word, all
those whose actions bring about their own inevitable punishment! He had
always been self-respecting and conscientious--not a prig, mind you, but
inclined rather to the serious than to the flippant side of life; and,
so inclining, he had found contentment and great material prosperity.

Not even in those days to which he was now looking back so regretfully
had Mr. Tapster always been perfectly content; but now the poor man,
sitting alone by his dining-room fire, remembered only what had been
good and pleasant in his former state. He was aware that his brother
William and William's wife, Maud, both thought that even now he had much
to be thankful for. His line of business was brisk, scarcely touched by
foreign competition, his income increasing at a steady rate of
progression, and his children were exceptionally healthy. But, alas! now
that, in place of there being a pretty little Mrs. Tapster on whom to
spend easily earned money, his substance was being squandered by a crowd
of unmanageable and yet indispensable thieves,--for so Mr. Tapster
voicelessly described the five servants whose loud talk and laughter
were even now floating up from the basement below,--he did not feel his
financial stability so comfortable a thing as he