o ask it, for I don't come as a
buyer."

"Well, if you have a taste for that sort of thing--are we out of sight
of the windows?--if so, let me have a cigarette like that you have
there. I have n't smoked for five months. Oh! is n't it a pleasure?"

"Tell me about Mrs. Butler,--who is she?"

"She is Mrs. Butler; and her husband, when he was alive, was Colonel
Butler, militarily known as Wat Tartar. He was a terrible pipeclay; and
her son Tony is the factotum at the Abbey; or rather he was, till Mark
told him to shave, a poodle, or singe a pony, or paint a wheelbarrow--I
forget; but I know it was something he had done once out of good-humor,
and the hussar creature fancied he'd make him do it again through an
indignity."

"And he--I mean Butler--stands upon being a gentleman?"

"I should think he does; is not his birth good?"

"Certainly; the Butlers are of an old stock."

"They talk of an uncle, Sir Ramrod,--it is n't Ramrod, but it's like
it,--a tiresome old fellow, who was envoy at Naples, and who married, I
believe, a ballet-dancer, and who might leave Tony all his fortune, if
he liked,--which he doesn't."

"Having no family of his own?" asked Maitland, as he puffed his cigar.

"None; but that doesn't matter, for he has turned Jesuit, and will leave
everything to the sacred something or other in Rome. I 've heard all
that from old Widow Butler, who has a perfect passion for talking of
her amiable brother-in-law, as she calls him. She hates him,--always did
hate him,--and taught Tony to hate him; and with all that it was only
yesterday she said to me that perhaps she was not fully justified in
sending back unopened two letters he had written to her,--one after the
loss of some Canadian bonds of hers, which got rumored abroad in the
newspapers; the other was on Tony's coming of age; and she said, 'Becky,
I begin to suspect that I had no right to carry my own unforgiveness to
the extent of an injury to my boy,--tell me what you would do.'"

"And what was your answer?"

"I'd have made it up with the old swell. I'd say, 'Is not this boy more
to you than all those long-petticoated tonsured humbugs, who can always
cheat some one or other out of an Inheritance?' I 'd say, 'Look at him,
and you'll fancy it's Walter telling you that he forgives you.'"

"If he be like most of his order, Miss Becky, he 'd only smile at your
appeal," said Maitland, coldly.

"Well, I 'd not let it be laughing matter with him, I can t