“Let me out!” he said savagely.

“No,” said the girl, meeting his frenzied gaze unwaveringly, “not until you are sober.”

He rushed to the door, but could not open it.  Then turning upon Mildred he said, “Give me the key—­no words—­or I’ll teach you who is master.”

There were no words, but only such a look as is rarely seen on. a woman’s face.  He raised his hand to strike her, but she did not shrink a hair-breadth.  “Papa,” she said, in a low, concentrated tone, “you called yourself a Southern gentleman.  I did not dream you could strike a woman, even when drunk.”

The effect of her words was magical.  His hand sank to his side.  Then he raised it and passed it over his brow as if it all were a horrid dream.  Without a word he went with unsteady step to his own room, and again Mildred locked the door upon him.

Mrs. Jocelyn’s swoon was long and death-like, and before Mildred could restore her, Belle, returning from her work, tried to enter, and finding the door locked called for admittance.  When she crossed the threshold and saw the supper dishes broken and scattered on the floor:  when she saw her mother looking as if dead, the little ones crying at her side, and Mildred scarcely less pale than the broken-hearted woman, with a desperate look in her blue eyes, the young girl gave a long, low cry of despair, and covering her face with her hands she sank into a chair murmuring, “I can’t endure this any longer—­I’d rather die.  We are just going to rack and ruin.  Oh, I wish I could die, for I’m getting reckless—­and—­and wicked.  Oh, oh, oh!—­”

“Belle, come and help me,” said Mildred, in the hard, constrained tones of one who is maintaining self-control by the utmost effort.  Belle complied, but there was an expression on her face that filled her sister’s soul with dread.

It were well perhaps to veil the agony endured in the stricken household that night.  The sufferings of such women as Mrs. Jocelyn and Mildred cannot be portrayed in words, and the dark chaos that had come into poor Belle’s tempted, despairing, immature soul might well make her good angel weep.  With a nature craving sunshine and pleasure like the breath of life, she felt herself being dragged hopelessly into darkness, shame, and abject poverty.  The poor child was not deliberately contemplating evil—­she was scarcely capable of doing good or evil deliberately—­but a youth who had sought her once before, and of whom she had long been shy, was again hovering around her.

She was more wary now, yet bolder, and received his advances with a manner tinged with mocking coquetry.  He was profuse with promises, and she tried to believe them, but in her heart she could not, and yet she did not repulse him with that stern, brief decision which forms the viewless, impassable wall that hedges virtue.

The sisters tried to remove the outward traces of their wrecked home, and mechanically restored such order as was within their power, but in their secret souls they saw their household gods overturned and trampled upon, and, with the honor and manhood of their father, they felt that night as if they had lost everything.