eyance as she went toward Lapham's door.

"Can't see you to-night, Zerrilla," he said bluffly, but not unkindly.
"Perhaps I'll call at the house, if it's important."

"It is," said the girl, with a spoiled air of insistence.

"Well," said Lapham, and, nodding to Corey to enter, he closed the door
upon her. Then he turned to the young, man and demanded: "Was I drunk
last night?"

XV.

LAPHAM'S strenuous face was broken up with the emotions that had forced
him to this question: shame, fear of the things that must have been
thought of him, mixed with a faint hope that he might be mistaken,
which died out at the shocked and pitying look in Corey's eyes.

"Was I drunk?" he repeated. "I ask you, because I was never touched by
drink in my life before, and I don't know." He stood with his huge
hands trembling on the back of his chair, and his dry lips apart, as he
stared at Corey.

"That is what every one understood, Colonel Lapham," said the young
man. "Every one saw how it was. Don't----"

"Did they talk it over after I left?" asked Lapham vulgarly.

"Excuse me," said Corey, blushing, "my father doesn't talk his guests
over with one another." He added, with youthful superfluity, "You were
among gentlemen."

"I was the only one that wasn't a gentleman there!" lamented Lapham.
"I disgraced you! I disgraced my family! I mortified your father before
his friends!" His head dropped. "I showed that I wasn't fit to go with
you. I'm not fit for any decent place. What did I say? What did I
do?" he asked, suddenly lifting his head and confronting Corey. "Out
with it! If you could bear to see it and hear it, I had ought to bear
to know it!"

"There was nothing--really nothing," said Corey. "Beyond the fact that
you were not quite yourself, there was nothing whatever. My father DID
speak of it to me," he confessed, "when we were alone. He said that he
was afraid we had not been thoughtful of you, if you were in the habit
of taking only water; I told him I had not seen wine at your table.
The others said nothing about you."

"Ah, but what did they think?"

"Probably what we did: that it was purely a misfortune--an accident."

"I wasn't fit to be there," persisted Lapham. "Do you want to leave?"
he asked, with savage abruptness.

"Leave?" faltered the young man.

"Yes; quit the business? Cut the whole connection?"

"I haven't the remotest idea of it!" cried Corey in amazement. "Why in
the world shoul