at all your future will
be irretrievably colored by it."

"In my state of health it is positively cruel for you to threaten me;
and some day when you follow my coffin to Mount Auburn, you will
repent your harshness. I wish to heaven I had never left home!"

A passionate fit of weeping curtailed the sentence, and, while the
face was covered with the lace handkerchief, the brother rose and made
his escape.

Despite the fact that forty years had left their whitening touches on
his head and luxuriant beard, Merton Minge, who had never been
handsome, even in youth, was sufficiently agreeable in appearance to
render him an object of deep interest in the circle where he moved.
Medium-statured, and very robust, a healthful ruddy tinge robbed his
complexion of that sallow hue which mercantile pursuits are apt to
induce, and brightened the deep-set black eyes which his debtors
considered mercilessly keen, cold, and incisive.

The square face, with its broad, full forehead, and deep curved furrow
dividing the thick straight brows,--its well-shaped but prominent
nose, and massive jaws and chin partially veiled by a grizzled beard
that swept over his deep chest,--was suggestive of ledgers rent-roll,
and stock-boards, rather than aesthetics, chivalry, or sentimentality.
The only son of a proud but impoverished family, who were eager to
retrieve their fortune, he had early in life married the imperious
spoiled daughter of a Boston millionaire, whose dower consisted of
five hundred thousand dollars, and a temper that eclipsed the
unamiable exploits of ancient and modern shrews.

Hopeless of domestic happiness in a union to which affection had not
prompted him, Mr. Minge devoted himself to the rapid accumulation of
wealth, and by judicious and successful speculations had doubled his
fortune, ere, at the comparatively early age of thirty, he was left a
childless widower. Whether he really thanked fate for his timely
release, his most intimate friends were never able to ascertain, for
he wore mourning, badges for three years, and conducted himself in all
respects with exemplary dignity and scrupulous propriety. But the
frigid indifference with which he received all matrimonial overtures
indicated that his conjugal experience was not so rosy as to tempt him
to repeat the experiment.

His mother was a haughty, frivolous woman, jealously tenacious of her
position as one of the oligarchs of _le beau monde_, and his fragile
sister had