“I don’t know, Eugene; I have long since abandoned the hope of ever being well again.  Perhaps I may be able to get down to the parlors.  There is Antoinette in the passage.  Good-night.”  She motioned him away.

He kissed her tenderly, shook hands a second time with Beulah, and left the room.  Cornelia bowed her head on her palms; and, though her features were concealed, Beulah thought she moaned, as if in pain.

“Cornelia, are you ill again?  What can I do for you?”

The feeble woman lifted her haggard face, and answered: 

“What can you do?  That remains to be seen.  Something must be done.  Beulah, I may die at any hour, and you must save him.”

“What do you mean?” Beulah’s heart throbbed painfully as she asked this simple question.

“You know very well what I mean!  Oh, Beulah!  Beulah! it bows my proud spirit into the dust!” Again she averted her head; there was a short silence.  Beulah leaned her face on her hand, and then Cornelia continued: 

“Did you detect it when he first came home?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, it is like a hideous nightmare!  I cannot realize that Eugene, so noble, so pure, so refined, could ever have gone to the excesses he has been guilty of.  He left home all that he should be; but five years abroad have strangely changed him.  My parents will not see it; my mother says ‘All young men are wild at first’; and my father shuts his eyes to his altered habits.  Eugene constantly drinks too much.  I have never seen him intoxicated.  I don’t know that he has been since he joined us in Italy; but I dread continually lest his miserable associates lead him further astray.  I had hoped that, in leaving his companions at the university, he had left temptation too; but the associates he has found here are even worse.  I hope I shall be quiet in my grave before I see him drunk.  It would kill me, I verily believe, to know that he had so utterly degraded himself.”

She shaded her face with her hands, and Beulah replied hastily: 

“He surely cannot fall so low!  Eugene will never reel home, an unconscious drunkard!  Oh, no, it is impossible! impossible!  The stars in heaven will fall first!”

“Do you believe what you say?”

“I hope it; and hope engenders faith,” answered Beulah.

A bitter smile curled Cornelia’s lips, and, sinking back in her chair, she continued: 

“Where excessive drinking is not considered a disgrace, young men indulge without a thought of the consequences.  Instead of excluding them from genteel circles, their dissipation is smoothed over, or unnoticed; and it has become so prevalent in this city that of all the gentlemen whom I meet in so-called fashionable society, there are very few who abstain from the wine-cup.  I have seen them at parties, staggering through a quadrille, or talking the most disgusting nonsense to girls, who have long since ceased to regard dissipation as a stigma upon the names and