"You may say so if you wish," he said.
"Meaning that things have changed since then?" questioned Lucas, in his tired drawl.
Nap threw up his head with the action of a jibbing horse. "You can put it how you like. You can say—if you like—that I am a bigger blackguard now than I was then. It makes no difference how you put it."
"But I want to know," said Lucas quietly. "Are you a blackguard, Boney?"
His eyes were fixed steadily upon the dusky face with its prominent cheek-bones and mocking mouth. Perhaps he knew, what Anne had discovered long before, that those sensitive lips might easily reveal what the fierce eyes hid.
"A matter of opinion," threw back Nap. "If I am, Anne Carfax has made me so."
"Anne Carfax," said Lucas very deliberately, "has done her best to make a man of you. It is not her fault if she has failed. It is not her fault that you have chosen to drag her friendship through the mire."
"Friendship!" broke in Nap. "She gave me more than that."
Lucas's brows contracted as if at a sudden dart of pain, but his voice was perfectly level as he made reply: "Whatever she gave you was the gift of a good woman of which you have proved yourself utterly unworthy."
Nap sprang to his feet. "Be it so!" he exclaimed harshly. "I am unworthy.
What of it? She always knew I was."