Floyd-Rosney had never been an intemperate man, but in this grim seclusion he began to drink heavily. He had piqued himself upon his delicate taste, his acumen as a judge of fine wines, but the Chambertin and Château Yquem remained untouched during his hasty dinners, while the brandy decanter had taken up a permanent position on the library table, and he had ordered up from the cellar an old and rich whisky that had been laid down by his father before he was born, and that he had, so far as the butler knew, never yet tasted. It was difficult for the lurking magnate, in his sullen seclusion, to face the eyes of his own domestic staff; he could not bring himself to confront the questioning, speculative gaze of the streets, the club, the driving park. Even such _rencontres_ as chanced when he went to consult his counsel, whom, but for very shame he would have summoned to him, he found an ordeal. He had grown poignantly sensitive and keenly perceptive as well, and was discriminating in minute points of facial expression and gradations of manner. He could differentiate embarrassment, commiseration,--and how pity stung him!--reprobation, and oftenest of all, a sort of covert relish, an elation, that with any personal relation would have meant triumph. “They are nearly as well pleased as if I were broken,” he would say cynically to himself. But there was no breach of courtesy, no abatement of the deep respect usually tendered to a magnate and millionaire. He was keenly alive to detect the insignia of a diminution of consideration, but his little world salaamed as heretofore, for he was by no means broken, not even if he should have to pay heavy alimony, and lose Duciehurst into the bargain. The experience of these encounters, however, weighed heavily on his nerves, now all a-quiver and jangling with the effects of his deep potations. His home was odious to him; his covert speculations as to the deductions of the servants, whom ordinarily he would have disregarded as mere worms of the earth, afflicted him. He was keenly conscious of his humiliated position in their eyes, cognizant as he knew them to be of his expectation of his wife’s return, and the elaborate preparations he had made and personally supervised for her reception. He found a greater degree of privacy and comfort on his yacht, which he ordered up from New Orleans, where she had been lying for a month past, refitted and revictualed, awaiting his summons. He steamed down the river to the Gulf on one occasion, but finding himself out of touch with his counsel in the Duciehurst case, and realizing that some final decision must be reached as to his course in the divorce suit, he confined his wanderings to idly cruising up and down the river, stopping at prearranged points for mail or telegrams.