wn
that he was going from bad to worse. He was a man of leisure, and he
drank as though he had found his vocation in the bottle. He was a
lonely man, and he drank as though drink was a friend in need and not
the deadliest foe. He was the only drunkard I ever knew who drank with
impenitent zest; and I saw something of him at his worst; he was more
approachable than he had been before his great surrender. All October
and November he kept it up, his name a byword far beyond the confines of
the Estate, and by December he must have been near the inevitable
climax. Then he disappeared. The servants had no idea of his
whereabouts; but he had taken luggage. That was the best reason for
believing him to be still alive, until he turned up with his boy for the
Christmas holidays.

It would be too much to say that he looked as he had looked last
holidays. The man had aged; he seemed even a little shaken, but not more
than by a moderate dose of influenza; and to a casual eye the
improvement was more astounding than the previous deterioration,
especially in its rapidity. His spirits were at least as good as they
had been before, his hospitality in keeping with the season. I ate my
Christmas dinner with father and son, and Delavoye and I first-footed
them on New Year's morning. What was most remarkable on these occasions
was the way Coplestone drank his champagne, with the happy moderation of
a man who has never exceeded in his life. There was now no shadow of
excess, but neither was there any of the weakling's recourse to the
opposite extreme of meticulous austerity. A doctor might have forbidden
even a hair of the sleeping dog, but to us young fellows it was a joy to
see our hero so completely his own man once more.

Early in January came a frost--a thrilling frost--with skating on the
gravel-pit ponds beyond the Village. It was a pastime in which I had
taken an untutored delight, all the days of my northern youth, and now I
put in every hour I could at the clumsy execution of elementary figures.
But Coplestone had spent some winters in Switzerland, and he was a past
master in the Continental style. Ordinary skaters would form a ring to
watch his dazzling displays, and those who had not seen him in the
autumn must have found it hard to credit the whispers of those who had.
His pink skin regained its former purity, his blue eyes shone like fairy
lamps, and the whole ice rang with the music of his "edge" as he sped
careening like a