worst of it is," and he spoke the words
brightly and bravely, "I've no excuse for it, if there can be found an
excusing for such a habit. The thing is growing upon me in this
solitude. I try, God alone knows how I try, for Katrine's sake, to
resist; but only those who have fought the thing can realize what its
temptations are. However, I've been thinking that if I drink too much,
or fail to suit you, it might make it easier for you to tell me to go,
if you knew it would be better for me that I went."

"I am hoping that you will not find it necessary to go, Mr. Dulany. The
plantation has never been in better shape."

"And I'm glad to hear you say that, sir," was the answer.
"Well"--hopefully--"things may change for the better in me, and so,
good-day," and spurring his horse he was off at a gallop down the broad
road, and Ravenel stood listening to the horse's hoofs clatter over the
bridge, strike the soft road under the pines, and die away in silence
before he turned into the bridle-path which led to the stables.

And a strange thing occurred but a few minutes after this interview,
when Frank made his daily visit to the stables. One of the head grooms
explained a horse's lameness to him as due to a bad place in the road
near the north gate which, he finished, would probably not be mended
until Mr. Dulany was over "his coming attack."

"Is he drinking again?" Ravenel asked.

"For three days past," the groom answered.

Francis made no comment whatever, but the next day he discovered the
man's suspicions justified, and the third, as he rode to Marlton, he saw
Katrine, a pale-faced, desolate little figure, sitting on the garden
bench, her head in her hands, the picture of despair. About five o'clock
Jerry drove to the station for Dr. Johnston, and the same evening after
the dinner Nora O'Grady's son, a red-haired, unkempt boy of seventeen,
brought a short letter from Katrine, asking that the doctor be sent as
soon as possible.

"Mr. Dulany is drinking?" Frank said, interrogatively, to the youth.

"Something fierce," was the laconic answer.

"Is he better this evening?"

"Worse. Heart's actin' up," the boy responded.

At the end of the week, after three days spent with the Dulanys, at the
old lodge, Dr. Johnston and Francis sat together at the dinner-table at
Ravenel. Mrs. Ravenel had left them, and the great doctor, in the
admirably restrained and cautious language of the scientific mind, gave
his findings in t