By the time they reached the landing the sun was low in the west, and his companion had become comparatively silent, dreamy, and abstracted.  Half an hour later Roger went on board of the boat with some solicitude to see how he was faring.  Mr. Jocelyn started out of what appeared a deep reverie as Roger addressed him, and said, after a moment’s thought, “Please say to my family that you left me well, and safely on my way,” and with a quiet and rather distant bow he resumed his absorbing thoughts.

The steamer moved away, but instead of returning directly home Roger went back to the hotel.  Even amid the hallucinations of opium the father had too much instinctive delicacy to mention Mildred’s name or to make any reference to Arnold’s intentions; but the quick-witted fellow gained the impression that the elegant young stranger had been a welcome and favored suitor in the past better days, and he had a consuming wish to see and study the kind of man that he surmised had been pleasing to Mildred.  As he rode along, pity for the girl took the place of resentment.  “Not our plain little farmhouse, but the fashionable hotel, is the place where she would feel the most at home,” he thought.  “And yet she is going to a tenement-house!  There, too, she’ll stay, I fear, for all that her father will ever do for her.  If he’s not off his balance, I never saw a man that was.”

CHAPTER XIII

A SCENE BENEATH THE HEMLOCKS

Roger sat out on the dusky piazza of the hotel, looking into the large parlor through open windows which came to the floor, bent on making the most of such glimpses as he could obtain of the world to which he felt that Mildred belonged by right.  He saw clearly that she would appear well and at home amid such surroundings.  A young and elegantly dressed woman crossed the wide apartment, and he muttered, “Your carriage is very fine and fashionable, no doubt, but Miss Jocelyn would have added grace and nature to your regulation gait.”  He watched the groups at the card-tables with a curious interest, and the bobbing heads of gossiping dowagers and matrons; he compared the remarkable “make up,” as he phrased it, of some of them with the unredeemed plainness of his mother’s Sunday gown.  “Neither the one nor the other is in good taste,” he thought.  “Mrs. Jocelyn dresses as I intend my mother shall some day.”  He coolly criticised a score or more of young men and women who were chatting, promenading, flitting through the open windows out upon the piazza and back again into the light, as a small stringed orchestra struck into a lively galop or the latest waltz.  He saw a general mustering of the younger guests, even down to the boys and girls, for the lancers, and followed one and another that caught his eye through the mazy intricacies, making little gestures of disgust at those who seemed outre and peculiar in manner and appearance, and regarding with the closest observation such as exhibited a happy mean between a certain rusticity and awkwardness with which he was well acquainted, and a conventional artificiality which was to him all the more unnatural and absurd because his perception was not dulled by familiarity with society’s passing whims.