leads the way to the apoplectic fit which
always threatens a man of your build."

The jeweller's incipient intoxication had vanished like smoke before the
wind. He looked at his son with fixed, uneasy eyes, trying to discover
whether he was making game of him.

But Beausire exclaimed:

"Oh, these confounded doctors! They all sing the same tune--eat nothing,
drink nothing, never make love or enjoy yourself; it all plays the devil
with your precious health. Well, all I can say is, I have done all these
things, sir, in every quarter of the globe, wherever and as often as I
have had the chance, and I am none the worse."

Pierre answered with some asperity:

"In the first place, captain, you are a stronger man than my father; and
in the next, all free livers talk as you do till the day when--when they
come back no more to say to the cautious doctor: 'You were right.' When
I see my father doing what is worst and most dangerous for him, it
is but natural that I should warn him. I should be a bad son if I did
otherwise."

Mme. Roland, much distressed, now put in her word: "Come, Pierre, what
ails you? For once it cannot hurt him. Think of what an occasion it
is for him, for all of us. You will spoil his pleasure and make us all
unhappy. It is too bad of you to do such a thing."

He muttered, as he shrugged his shoulders.

"He can do as he pleases. I have warned him."

But father Roland did not drink. He sat looking at his glass full of the
clear and luminous liquor while its light soul, its intoxicating soul,
flew off in tiny bubbles mounting from its depths in hurried succession
to die on the surface. He looked at it with the suspicious eye of a fox
smelling at a dead hen and suspecting a trap. He asked doubtfully: "Do
you think it will really do me much harm?" Pierre had a pang of remorse
and blamed himself for letting his ill-humour punish the rest.

"No," said he. "Just for once you may drink it; but do not take too
much, or get into the habit of it."

Then old Roland raised his glass, but still he could not make up his
mind to put it to his lips. He contemplated it regretfully, with longing
and with fear; then he smelt it, tasted it, drank it in sips, swallowing
them slowly, his heart full of terrors, of weakness and greediness; and
then, when he had drained the last drop, of regret.

Pierre's eye suddenly met that of Mme. Rosemilly; it rested on him clear
and blue, far-seeing and hard. And he read, he knew,