While this dialogue was going on, the rest of the party was too full of noisy mirth to notice what was passing. Mark's voice was getting very wild and conspicuous; and now he made his way with flushed face and sparkling eyes to Mary, who was sitting quietly between her mother and Mr Tankardew. He carried a jug in one hand, and a glass in the other, and, without noticing the elder people, exclaimed, "It is an hour yet to supper time, and you'll be dead with thirst; I am sure I am. You must take some of this, it is capital stuff; our butler made it: I have just had a tumbler--it is punch. Come, Mary, you must," and he thrust the glass into her hand: "you must, I say; you shall; never mind old Tanky," he added, in what he meant to be a whisper. Then he raised the jug with unsteady fingers, but, before a drop could reach the tumbler, Mr Tankardew had risen, and with one sweep of his hand dashed it out of Mary's grasp on the ground. Few heard the crash, amidst the din of the general merriment, and those who noticed it supposed it to be an accident. "Nearly lost!" whispered Mr Tankardew in Mary's ear; then he said, in a louder voice, "Faugh! The atmosphere of this place does not suit me. I must retire. Mrs Franklin, pray make an old man's excuses to our host and hostess." He was _gone_! CHAPTER THREE. THE SWOLLEN STREAM. It is the morning after the juvenile party at "The Firs." A clear, bright frost still: everything _outside_ the house fresh and vigorous: half-a-dozen labourers' little children running to school with faces like peonies; jumping, racing, sliding, puffing out clouds of steaming breath as they shout out again and again for very excess of health and spirits. Everything _inside_ the house limp, languid, and lugubrious; the fires are sulky and won't burn; the maids are sulkier still. Mr Rothwell breakfasts alone, feeling warm in nothing but his temper: the grate sends forth little white jets of smoke from a wall of black coal, instead of presenting a cheery surface of glowing heat: the toast is black at the corners and white in the middle: the eggs look so truly new laid that they seem to have come at once from the henhouse to the table, without passing through the saucepan: the coffee is feeble and the milk smoked: the news in the daily papers is flat, and the state of affairs in country and county peculiarly depressing. Upstairs, Mrs Rothwell tosses about with a sick headache, unable to rest and unwilling to rise. The young ladies are dawdling in dressing-gowns over a bedroom breakfast, and exchanging mutual sarcasms and recriminations, blended with gall and bitterness flung back on last night's party. Poor Mark has the worst of it, nausea and splitting headache, with a shameful sense of having made both a fool and a beast of himself. So much for the delights of "lots of negus, wine, and punch!" He has also a humbling remembrance of having been rude to Mr Tankardew. A knock at his door. "Come in."