Mr. Gillat looked at her uneasily; every now and then there flitted through his mind a suspicion that Julia was clever too, as clever perhaps as her mother, and though not, like her, a moral and social pillar standing in the high first estate from which he and the Captain had fallen.  Julia had never been that, never aspired to it; she was no success at all; content to come and sit in the dining-room with him and Bouquet; she could not really be clever, or else she would have achieved something for herself, and scorned to consort with failures.  He smiled benignly as he remembered this, observing, “I dare say something will be done—­I hope it may; your mother’s a wonderful woman, a wonderful—­”

He broke off to listen; Julia listened too, then she rose to her feet.  “That’s father,” she said, and went to let him in.

Mr. Gillat followed her to the door.  “Ah—­h’m,” he said, as he saw the Captain coming in slowly, with a face of despairing melancholy and a drooping step.

“Come down-stairs, father,” Julia said.  “Come along, Johnny.”

They followed her meekly to the basement, where there was a gloomy little room behind the kitchen reserved for the Captain’s special use.  A paraffin stove stood in the fire-place also, own brother to the one in the dining-room; Julia stooped to light it, while her father sank into a chair.

“Gillat,” he said in a voice of hopelessness, “I am a ruined man.”

“No?” Mr. Gillat answered sympathetically, but without surprise.  “Dear me!” He carefully put down the hat and stick he had brought with him, the one on the edge of the table, the other against it, both so badly balanced that they fell to the ground.

“You shouldn’t do it, you know,” he said, with mild reproof; “you really shouldn’t.”

“Do it!” the Captain cried.  “Do what?”

Julia looked up from the floor where she knelt trimming the stove-lamp.  “Have five whiskeys and sodas,” she said, examining her father judicially.

He did not deny the charge; Julia’s observation was not to be avoided.

“And what is five?” he demanded with dignity.

“Three too many for you,” she answered.

“Do you mean to insinuate that I am intoxicated?” he asked.  “Johnny,” he turned pathetically to his friend, “my own daughter insinuates that I am intoxicated.”

“No,” Julia said, “I don’t; I say it does not agree with you, and it doesn’t—­you know you ought not to take more than two glasses.”

“Is that your opinion, Gillat?” Captain Polkington asked.  “Is that what you meant?  That I—­I should confine myself to two glasses of whiskey and water?”

“I wasn’t thinking of the whiskey,” Johnny said apologetically; “it was the gees.”

The Captain groaned, but what he said more Julia did not hear; she went out into the kitchen to get paraffin.  But she had no doubt that he defended the attacked point to his own satisfaction, as he always had done—­cards, races, and kindred pleasant, if expensive, things, ever since the days long ago before he sent in his papers.