"Mr. Sibley is certainly nothing to me, and I hope nothing to Ida. Get rid of him any way you can, since things have reached the pass you represent. If society is going to put him under ban, we must cut him; that's all there is about it, and his behavior at dinner gives us an excuse." During this conversation Mr. Mayhew had been lying on the sofa with closed eyes, and as motionless as if he were dead. Now he said in low, bitter tones: "Mark it well--an excuse, not a reason. O, virtue! how beautiful thou art!" "You are the last one in the world to speak on this subject," said Mrs. Mayhew, angrily. "Right again. You see, Ik, my family never before met a man who promised to make such an appropriate addition to our number. It's a pity you are interfering;" and he poured out a large glass of brandy. "Would to God I had died before I had seen this day!" cried Ida in a tone of such sharp agony that all turned towards her in a questioning surprise; but she rushed into her own room and locked the door after her. "Things have gone farther between her and Sibley than we thought," said Stanton, gloomily. "Well, Ik," said Mr. Mayhew with a laugh that was dreadful to hear, "you had better cut loose from us. We are all going to the devil by the shortest cut." "Would to heaven I had never seen you!" cried Mrs. Mayhew, hysterically. "YOU are the one who is dragging us down. If my nephew deserts us, I will brand him as a coward and no gentleman." "I'll not desert you unless you desert yourself," said Stanton, with a gesture of disgust and impatience; "but if you persist in going down into the deepest quagmires you can find, you cannot expect me to follow you;" and with these words he left the room. Mr. Mayhew was soon sunk in the deepest lethargy, and his wife spent the afternoon in impotently fretting and fuming against her "miserable fate," as she termed it, and in trying to devise some way of keeping up appearances. Chapter XXVIII. Rather Volcanic. Stanton was glad to escape from the house after the interview described in the previous chapter; and observing that Van Berg was reclining under a tree at some little distance from the hotel, stolled thither and threw himself down on the grass beside him. But his perturbation was so evident that his friend remarked: "You are out of sorts, Ik. What's the matter?" "I've been settling this Sibley business with my aunt and cousin," snarled Stanton; "and some women always make such blasted fools of themselves. But they won't have anything more to do with him; at least, I'm sure my aunt won't. As for Ida--but the less said the better. I'm so out of patience with her folly that I can't trust myself to speak of her."