“I tired? Nonsense, child! I have had the merriest evening in the world. I'll have another to-morrow, for I've asked them all to dine here. We'll give dinner parties to all the county.”
“Papa,” said Olive, timidly, “will that be quite right, after what you told me of our being now so much poorer than we were?”
“Did I? Pshaw! I don't remember. However, I am a rich man now; richer than I have ever been.”
“I am so glad; because then, dear papa, you know you need not be so much away from home, or weary yourself with the speculations you told me of; but come and live quietly with us.”
Her father laughed loudly. “Foolish little girl! your notion of quietness would not suit a man like me. Take my word for it, Olive, home serves as a fantastic dream till five-and-twenty, and then means nothing at all. A man's home is the world.”
“Is it?”
“Ay, as I intend to show to you. By-the-by, I shall give up this stupid place, and enter into society. Your mother will like it, of course; and you, as my only child—eh, what did I say?” here he stopped hastily with a blank, frightened look—then repeated, “Yes, you, my only child, will be properly introduced to the world. Why, you will be quite an heiress, my girl,” continued he, with an excited jocularity that frightened Olive. “And the world always courts such; who knows but that you may marry in spite of”——
“Oh, no—never!” interrupted Olive, turning away with bitter pain.
“Come, don't mind it,” continued her father, with a reckless indifference to her feelings, quite unusual to him. “Why—my little sensible girl—you are better than any beauty in England; beauties are all fools, or worse.”
And he laughed so loud, so long, that Olive was seized with a great horror, that absorbed even her own individual suffering. Was her father mad? Alas! there is a madness worse than disease, a voluntary madness, by which a man—longing at any price for excitement, or oblivion—“puts an enemy into his mouth to steal away his brains.” This was the foe—the stealthy-footed demon, that had at last come to overmaster the brave and noble Angus Rothesay. As yet it ruled him not—he was no sot; but his daughter saw enough to know that the fiend was nigh upon him—that this night he was even in its grasp.