He ceased his walk and gazed eagerly at her, hoping for some affirmative sign. As may be supposed Lillie could not give it; she could make no very distinct signs just then, either one way or the other; she did not speak, nor look at him, nor shake her head, nor nod it; she only covered her face with her hands, and sobbed. Then the Doctor, feeling himself to be forsaken, and acknowledging it by outward dumb show, after the manner of men who are greatly moved, went to the other end of the room, sat down by himself and dropped his head into his hands, as if accepting utter loneliness in the world. Lillie gave him one glance in his acknowledged extremity of desertion, and, running to him, knelt at his feet and laid her head against his. She was certainly the most unhappy of the two, but her eagerness was even stronger than her misery. "Oh papa! _Why_ do you hate him so?" "I don't hate him. I dread him. I suspect him. I know he will not make you happy. I know he will make you miserable." "But why?--_why?_ Perhaps he can explain it. Tell him what you think, papa. I am sure he can explain every thing." But the Doctor only groaned, rose up, disentangled himself from his daughter, and leaving her there on the floor, continued his doleful walk. Never having really feared what had come to pass, but only given occasional thought to it as a possible though improbable calamity, he had not inquired strictly into Carter's manner of life, and so had nothing definite to allege against him. At the same time he knew perfectly well from trifling circumstances, incidental remarks, general air and bearing, that he was one of the class known in the world as "men about town:" a class not only obnoxious to the Doctor's moral sentiments as the antipodes of his own purity, but also as being a natural product of that slaveholding system which he regarded as a compendium of injustice and wickedness; a class the members of which were constantly coming to grief and bringing sorrow upon those who held them in affection. He knew them; he had watched and disliked them since his childhood; he was familiar by unpleasant observation with their language, feelings, and doings; he knew where they began, how they went on, and in what sort they ended. The calamities which they wrought for themselves and all who were connected with them he had witnessed in a hundred similar, and, so to speak, reflected instances. He remembered young Hammersley, who had sunk down in drunken paralysis and burned his feet to a crisp at his father's fire. Young Ellicot had dashed out his brains by leaping from a fourth story window in a fit of delirium tremens. Tom Akers was shot dead while drunk by a negro whom he had horribly tortured. Fred Sanderson beat his wife until she left him, spent his property at bars and gaming-tables and died in Cuba with Walker. Others he recollected, by the dozen, it seemed to him, who had fallen, wild with whiskey, in grog-shop broils or savage street rencontres.