“Better! decidedly better!” said Skeffy, puffing his cigar, and thinking over that snowstorm of Christmas bills which awaited him on his return.
“If it were not for one thing, Skeffy, I 'd never leave it,” said he, with a deep sigh, and a look that said as plainly as ever words spoke, “Let me open my heart to you.”
“I know it all, old fellow, just as if you had confessed it to me. I know the whole story.”
“What do you know, or what do you suspect you know?” said Tony, growing red.
“I say,” said Skeffy, with that tone of superiority that he liked to assume,—“I say that I read you like a book.”
“Read aloud, then, and I 'll say if you 're right”
“It 's wrong with you here, Butler,” said Skeffy, laying his hand on the other's heart; and a deep sigh was all the answer. “Give me another weed,” said Skeffy, and for some seconds he employed himself in lighting it “There's not a man in England,” said he, slowly, and with the deliberateness of a judge in giving sentence,—“not a man in England knows more of these sort of things than I do. You, I 'm certain, take me for a man of pleasure and the world,—a gay, butterfly sort of creature, flitting at will from flower to flower; or you believe me—and in that with more reason—a fellow full of ambition, and determined to play a high stake in life; but yet, Tony Butler, within all these there is another nature, like the holy of holies in the sanctuary. Ay, my dear friend, there is the—what the poet calls the 'crimson heart within the rose.' Isn't that it?”
“I don't know,” said Tony, bluntly.
And now Skeffy smoked on for some minutes without a word. At length he said, in a solemn tone, “It has not been for nothing, Butler, that I acquired the gift I speak of. If I see into the hearts of men like you, I have paid the price of it.”
“I 'm not so certain that you can do it” said Tony, half doubting his friend's skill, and half eager to provoke an exercise of it.