Dora looked at him in contempt, and pointed out a tall mirror, before which they were both standing. It reflected her own tall, straight form, and also the figure of the disreputable old sinner.
"Can you see your face and deny it?" she said in a tone of rebuke. "Your eyes are red, your clothes are awry, your----"
"Leave me to bear the burden of my own sins," said Joad sullenly; "if I take brandy, I don't ask you to pay for it."
"But you are a gentleman, a scholar," persisted Dora, sorry for the wretched old creature; "you should be above such low vices."
"We cannot be above the depths to which we have fallen, Miss Carew. My life has been one long failure, so it is scarcely to be wondered at that I fly to drink for consolation. Few men have been so hardly treated as I have been."
"Yet Mr. Edermont helped you."
"No doubt," retorted Joad viciously; "but he would not have stretched out a finger to save me if I had not forced him to."
"You forced Mr. Edermont to----?"
"I forced him to nothing," interrupted Joad, seeing that he had gone too far. "It is only my way of speaking. Don't mind the ramblings of a foolish old failure."
Dora looked at him silently. His eyes were filled with tears, and, ashamed of betraying his emotion, he turned away to busy himself with dusting a book. In the few words which he had let slip Dora saw that he had possessed some power over the dead man which had won him house and home. That power she believed was connected with the lifelong misery of Edermont, and with the fact of his murder. The idea made her take an unexpected step. Seizing the astonished Joad by the arm, she whirled him round, so as to look straight into his eyes.