“I 'm saying, that maybe you'd drink a glass of wine, Hans?” repeated Dalton; but still no answer came. “What dreamy creatures them Germans are!” muttered Peter. “And then,” exclaimed Hanserl, as if speaking to himself, “it is but beginning life anew. Good-bye--farewell.” And so saying, he touched his cap courteously, and moved hastily away, while Dalton continued to look after him with compassionate sorrow, for one so little capable of directing his path in life. As he re-entered the house, he found Mrs. Ricketts, abandoning all hopes of her distinguished guests, had just ordered the dinner; and honest Peter consoled himself for their absence by observing that they should be twice as jolly by themselves! Had it depended on himself alone, the sentiment might have had some foundation, for there was something of almost wild gayety in his manner. All the vicissitudes of the morning, the painful alternations of hope and fear,--hope so faint as to be a torture, and fear so dark as to be almost despair,--had worked him up to a state of extreme excitement. To add to this, he drank deeply, quaffing off whole goblets of wine, and seeming to exult in the mad whirlwind of his own reckless jollity. If the jests he uttered on Scroope's costume, or the other allegorical fancies of Zoe's brain, were not of the most refined taste, they were at least heartily applauded by the indulgent public around his board. Mrs. Ricketts was in perfect ecstasies at the flashes of his “Irish wit;” and even Martha, fain to take on credit what was so worthily endorsed, laughed her own meek laugh of approval. As for Purvis, champagne completed what nature had but begun, and he became perfectly unintelligible ere dinner was over. All this while poor Nelly's sufferings were extreme; she saw the unblushing, shameless adulation of the parasites, and she saw, too, the more than commonly excited glare in her father's eyes,----the wildness of fever rather than the passing excitation of wine. In vain, her imploring, beseeching glances were turned towards him; in vain she sought, by all her little devices, to withdraw him from the scene of riotous debauch, or recall him from the excesses of a revel which was an orgie. In his wild and boastful vein he raved about “home,” as he still called it, and of his family possessions,----at times vaunting of his wealth and greatness, and then, as suddenly breaking into mad invectives against the Jews and money-lenders, to whom his necessities had reduced him.