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If I remember rightly, it was two months since I had laid eyes on my cousin, when, on returning home one evening, I noticed that the front door stood wide open, and had apparently been left to take care of itself. As I mounted the steps, a little annoyed at Mary’s carelessness, I heard voices in the hall. Washington Flagg was standing at the foot of the staircase, with his hand on the newel-post, and Mrs. Wesley was halfway up the stairs, as if in the act of descending. I learned later that she had occupied this position for about three quarters of an hour. She was extremely pale and much agitated. Flagg’s flushed face and tilted hat told his part of the story. He was not in one of his saturnine moods. He was amiably, and, if I may say it, gracefully drunk, and evidently had all his wits about him.

“I’ve been telling Mrs. Wesley,” he began at once, as if I had been present all the while, and he was politely lifting me into the conversation–“I’ve been telling Mrs. Wesley that I’m a Lost Cause.”

“A lost soul,” was Mrs. Wesley’s amendment from the staircase. “Oh, Tom, I am so glad you have come! I thought you never would! I let him in an hour or two ago, and he has kept me here ever since.”

“You were so entertaining,” said my cousin, with a courteous sweep of his disengaged hand, and speaking with that correctness of enunciation which sometimes survives everything.

“Flagg,” I said, stepping to his side, “you will oblige me by returning to your lodgings.”

“You think I’m not all right?”

“I am sure of it.”

“And you don’t want me here, dear old boy?”

“No, I don’t want you here. The time has come for me to be frank with you, Flagg, and I see that your mind is clear enough to enable you to understand what I say.”

“I reckon I can follow you, Thomas.”

“My stock of romantic nonsense about kinship and family duties, and all that, has given out, and will not be renewed.”

“Won’t do business any more at the old stand?”

“Exactly so. I have done everything I could to help you, and you have done nothing whatever for yourself. You have not even done yourself the scant justice of treating Clara and me decently. In future you will be obliged to look after your own affairs, financial as well as social. Your best plan now is to go to work. I shall no longer concern myself with your comings and goings, except so far as to prevent you from coming here and disturbing Clara. Have you put that down?”

“Wesley, my boy, I’ll pay you for this.”

“If you do, it will be the first thing you have paid for since you came North.”

My statement, however accurate, was not wholly delicate, and I subsequently regretted it, but when a patient man loses his patience he goes to extremes. Washington Flagg straightened himself for an instant, and then smiled upon me in an amused, patronizing way quite untranslatable.

“Thomas, that was neat, very neat–for you. When I see Judge Ashburton Todhunter I’ll tell him about it. It’s the sort of mild joke he likes.”

“I should be proud to have Judge Ashburton Todhunter’s approval of any remark of mine, but in the meanwhile it would be a greater pleasure to me to have you return at once to Macdougal Street, where, no doubt, Mrs. Morgan is delaying dinner for you.”

“Say no more, Wesley. I’ll never set foot in your house again, as sure as my name is Flagg–and long may I wave o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

“He is a kind of Flagg that I don’t wish to have wave over MY home,” said Mrs. Wesley, descending the stairs as my cousin with painful care closed the door softly behind him.

So the end was come. It had come with less unpleasantness than I should have predicted. The ties of kindred, too tightly stretched, had snapped; but they had snapped very gently, so to speak.