"From whom have you learned this?" demanded Mr. Jocelyn, looking angrily and suspiciously around. "I assure you that you are mistaken. I never was in better health, and I am not pleased that any one should gossip about me."
They sat down under a miserable constraint—Belle flushed and indignant, Mildred no longer disguising her sadness, and poor Mrs. Jocelyn with moist eyes making a pitiful attempt to restore serenity so that Belle's happy day might not become clouded. Roger tried to break the evil spell by giving his impressions of the Park to Mrs. Jocelyn, but was interrupted by her husband, who had been watching the young man with a perplexed, suspicious look, vainly trying to recall the name of one whose face was familiar enough, remarking at last very satirically, "Has it ceased to be the style to introduce people, especially at one's own table? I might appreciate this gentleman's conversation better if I knew his name."
They all looked at each other in sudden dismay, for they could not know that opium impairs memory as well as health and manhood. "Martin," cried his wife, in a tone of sharp distress, "you ARE ill, indeed. There is no use in trying to disguise the truth any longer. What! don't you remember Roger Atwood, the son of the kind friends with whom we spent the summer?" and in spite of all effort tears blinded her eyes.
The wretched man's instinct of self-preservation was aroused. He saw from the looks of all about him that he was betraying himself—that he was wholly off his balance. While vividly and painfully aware of his danger, his enfeebled will and opium-clouded mind were impotent to steady and sustain him or to direct his course. He had much of the terror and all the sense of helplessness of a man who finds himself in deep water and cannot swim. He trembled, the perspiration started out on his brow, and his one impulse now was to be alone with his terrible master, that had become the sole source of his semblance of strength as well as of his real and fatal weakness. "I—I fear I am ill," he faltered. "I'll go out and get a little air," and he was about to leave the room almost precipitately.
"Oh, Martin," expostulated his wife, "don't go out—at least not alone."
Again he lost control of himself, and said savagely, "I will. Don't any one dare to follow me," and he almost rushed away.
For a moment Mrs. Jocelyn tried to bear up from instinctive politeness, but her lip quivered like that of a child; then the tide of her feeling swept her away, and she fled to the adjoining apartment. Mildred followed her at once, and Belle, with a white, scared face, looked into Roger's eyes. He rose and came directly to her and said, "Belle, you know you can always count on me. Your father is so ill that I think I had better follow him. I can do so unobserved."
"Oh, Roger—why—is—is papa losing his mind?"
His quick eye now noted that Fred and Minnie had become so impressed that something dreadful had happened that they were about to make the occasion more painful by their outcries, and he turned smilingly to them, and with a few reassuring words and promises soon quieted their fears. "Be a brave little woman, Belle," he at last said to her. "There is my address, and please promise to let me know if I can do anything for you and for—for Mrs. Jocelyn."
"Don't go—please don't go yet," Belle pleaded. "Papa's looks and words to-night fill me with a strange fear as if something awful might happen."