No answer.
“Mr Harrington!”
The taps were louder, but there was no reply.
“I thought as much,” she muttered. “Broken out again, and in a regular drunkard’s sleep. No; it’s an insult to sober people’s rest to call it sleep—stupor. Oh, my poor girl, my poor girl! If I could only save you from being this dreadful man’s wife.”
“Mr Harrington!” she cried again, after a pause; but all was still. Then the taps she had previously given upon the door became heavy thumps. “Mr Harrington, are you coming down to breakfast?”
“Is anything the matter, ma’am?” said the old housekeeper coming slowly up the stairs.
“Yes, Mrs Denton; no, Mrs Denton; yes, Mrs Denton. I mean nothing serious, but it’s very dreadful.”
The old housekeeper shook her head; and the tears stood in her eyes as she walked to the end of the wide passage, and descended to the embayed window looking upon the garden, where she used her apron to flick off some white powdery dust from the sill.
“Yes, ma’am,” she said, “it is very dreadful. I know what you mean. Poor dear master liked his two or three glasses of port after his dinner, but that was all. Unless any one was ill you never saw a drop of spirits about the place, while now it’s brandy and whiskey, and soda and seltzer, as is a pair of shams, not to make the spirits weaker, but to coax people on to drink more.”
“You think the same as I do then, Denton?” whispered Mrs Hampton.