As Gallatin spoke, his long frame slowly straightened, his head drew well back on his shoulders and a new fire glowed in his eyes.
“It was great!” he went on. “I don’t believe any man alive ever felt more sure of himself than I did when I wound up that case and shut up my desk for the day. If I won, and win I should, it would give Kenyon, Hood and Gallatin a lot of prestige. Things looked pretty bright that night. I began to see the possibilities of a career, Nellie, a real career that even a Gallatin might be proud of.”
He came to a sudden pause, his figure crumpled, and the glow in his eyes faded as though a film had fallen across them.
“And then?” asked Nellie Pennington.
“And then,” he muttered haltingly, “something happened to me—I had a—a disappointment—and things went all wrong inside of me—I didn’t care what happened. I went to the bad, Nellie, clean—clean to the bad——”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Pennington softly, “I heard. That’s why I spoke to you to-night. You haven’t been——”
“No, thank God, I’m keeping straight now, but it did hurt to have done so well and then to have failed so utterly. You see the case I was speaking of—Kenyon, Hood and Gallatin had turned the whole business over to me, and I wasn’t there to plead. They couldn’t find me. There was a postponement, of course, but my opportunity had passed and it won’t come again.”
He stopped, glanced at her face and then turned away. “I don’t know why I’ve told you these things,” he finished soberly, “for sympathy is hardly the kind of thing a man in my position can stand for.”
Nellie Pennington remained silent. Her interest was deep and her wonder uncontrollable. Therefore, being a woman, she did not question. She only waited. Her woman’s eyes to-night had been wide open, and she had already made a rapid diagnosis of which her curiosity compelled a confirmation.
They were alone at their end of the room. Miss Loring and Mr. Van Duyn had gone in to the bridge tables and Egerton Savage was conversing in a low tone with Betty Tremaine, whose fingers straying over the piano, were running softly through an aria from “La Bohème.”