"Why so?" asked the clergyman, betraying surprise.
"What's the matter? No family trouble, I hope?"
"Very serious trouble I should call it were it my own," returned the lady.
"I am pained to hear you speak so. What has occurred?"
"Haven't you noticed her son to-night? There! That was his laugh. He's been drinking too much. I saw his mother looking at him a little while ago with eyes so full of sorrow and suffering that it made my heart ache."
"Oh, I hope it's nothing," replied Mr. Elliott. "Young men will become a little gay on these occasions; we must expect that. All of them don't bear wine alike. It's mortifying to Mrs. Whitford, of course, but she's a stately woman, you know, and sensitive about proprieties."
Mr. Elliott did not wait for the lady's answer, but turned to address another person who came forward at the moment to speak to him.
"Sensitive about proprieties," said the lady to herself, with some feeling, as she stood looking down the room to where Ellis Whitford in a group of young men and women was giving vent to his exuberant spirits more noisily than befitted the place and occasion. "Mr. Elliott calls things by dainty names."
"I call that disgraceful," remarked an elderly lady, in a severe tone, as if replying to the other's thought.
"Young men will become a little gay on these occasions," said the person to whom she had spoken, with some irony in her tone. "So Mr. Elliott says."