with an effort to seem just as
usual. "You are--a very good girl--I'm much obliged to you. The pleasure
is--I may truly say on both sides." And he energetically struck the
table with his hand.

Olive thought this an odd form of speech; but her father's manner was
grown so changed of late--sometimes he seemed quite in high spirits,
even jocose--as he did now.

"I am glad to see you are not much tired, papa. I thought you were--you
walked so wearily when you first came in."

"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