They dared not ask him any questions, for there was something about him, a touch of savageness and smothered bitterness in his manner which warned them that any display of curiosity would be resented.
"I can't make Blair out," said Lord Aldmere to Colonel Floyd. It was at a well-known club which does not open its doors until well-regulated people have gone to bed. "What he has been doing, Heaven only knows; but I never saw a man so changed. Why it was only this summer that he was in the best of form bright as a—a star, don't you know, and now—look at him!" he concluded, glancing across the room at Blair, as he sat moodily over the fire, a big cigar in his mouth, his haggard face drooping on his breast, his sad eyes fixed gloomily on the ground. "Never saw such a change in a man in all my life."
"He has been ill, you know," said the colonel, eying the drooping, listless figure with a troubled regard; "had a fever and all that kind of thing."
"Yes—I know," said the marquis, stammeringly; "but other fellows have had fevers, and they don't cut up like that. I had the fever—no, I think it was measles, or mumps, or something, but I pulled round all right, and was as jolly as a sandboy after all. It isn't the fever that's done it, Floyd; there's something else, depend upon it. Where has he been all this time? nobody knows exactly."
"You'd better ask him," said the colonel, with grim irony.
"Ask him!" stuttered the marquis; "I dare say! I expect I should get my head snapped off! Some fellow said something about Paris yesterday, and turning to Blair, said: 'But you were there then, weren't you, Blair?' and Blair just turned and glared at him as if he was going to eat him! No, by George, you bet I don't ask him anything!"
"Perhaps you'd better not," assented the colonel. "Discretion is the better part of valor. But he isn't always like this, is he?" he asked, in an undertone.
"No, not always," replied Aldmere. "He'll wake up presently and pull himself together, and then he'll go into the dining-room and order some dinner, and as like as not when it comes he'll march out and leave it! I've seen him do it two or three times, by Jove! and then later on he'll take a big drink, and when he's livened up a bit, he'll go down to the Green Table."
The colonel whistled. The Green Table was the fashionable gaming club, and the proprietor might appropriately have inscribed over its handsome stone doorway, "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!" for many a man had found cause to rue the hour in which he passed its portals.