y take more
exercise."

It gave me some satisfaction to observe that, shuffling and cowardly
though I might be, I was not a person easily bamboozled.

"Nonsense," I told myself brutally; "don't try to deceive me. You were
drunk."

"Not drunk," I pleaded; "don't say drunk; it is such a coarse
expression. Some people cannot stand sweet champagne, so I have heard.
It affected my liver. Do please make it a question of liver."

"Drunk," I persisted unrelentingly, "hopelessly, vulgarly drunk--drunk
as any 'Arry after a Bank Holiday."

"It is the first time," I murmured.

"It was your first opportunity," I replied.

"Never again," I promised.

"The stock phrase," I returned.

"How old are you?"

"Nineteen."

"So you have not even the excuse of youth. How do you know that it will
not grow upon you; that, having thus commenced a downward career, you
will not sink lower and lower, and so end by becoming a confirmed sot?"

My heavy head dropped into my hands, and I groaned. Many a temperance
tale perused on Sunday afternoons came back to me. Imaginative in all
directions, I watched myself hastening toward a drunkard's grave, now
heroically struggling against temptation, now weakly yielding, the
craving growing upon me. In the misty air about me I saw my father's
white face, my mother's sad eyes. I thought of Barbara, of the scorn
that could quiver round that bewitching mouth; of Hal, with his
tremendous contempt for all forms of weakness. Shame of the present and
terror of the future between them racked my mind.

"It shall be never again!" I cried aloud. "By God, it shall!" (At
nineteen one is apt to be vehement.) "I will leave this house at once,"
I continued to myself aloud; "I will get away from its unwholesome
atmosphere. I will wipe it out of my mind, and all connected with it. I
will make a fresh start. I will--"

Something I had been dimly conscious of at the back of my brain came
forward and stood before me: the flabby figure of Miss Rosina Sellars.
What was she doing here? What right had she to step between me and my
regeneration?

"The right of your affianced bride," my other half explained, with a
grim smile to myself.

"Did I really go so far as that?"

"We will not go into details," I replied; "I do not wish to dwell upon
them. That was the result."

"I was--I was not quite myself at the time. I did not know what I was
doing."

"As a rule, we don't when we do foolish things; but we have to a