"It's the real stuff," he said. "Towler slips it to me—good old pal! He's got one of the guards 'fixed'! Here—drink hearty!" With a hoarse laugh he thrust it into Harry's face.
Harry's eyes had been fixed on his with a curious intensity. In that startling moment, as the fumes of the liquor penetrated his nostrils, a lurid sequence had flashed to him. This man he had once betrayed by a base surrender to appetite; now in antic irony, it was this man's crime that had betrayed him, Harry Sevier, to the same dilemma and a like shameful penalty. And here was dangled before him the hideous badge and symbol of his downfall!
He seized the wrist of the outstretched hand with a grasp like steel, and the flask smashed against the bars of the window. Then he hurled the other from him across the narrow cell.
His cell-mate clung to the bunk across which he had fallen, and stared at Harry with a look of slow malevolence. He licked his lips.
"I'll fix you for that!" he said.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE MAN IN THE WHEELED CHAIR
Echo sat under the Botticelli blue of a perfect afternoon on the terrace of the Hotel Splendid in Nice. Through the hot, bright air, set in the purple creases of the hazeless hills, she could see tinted villas drowsing in golden gardens aflame with flowers, and below under the dizzying sunlight beyond the long esplanade, tiny swells spilled over the pearly beech like molten sapphire.
The past months had been packed with new sights and sounds. There had been the ocean passage, with all the gaiety that mill-pond weather and a total absence of mal de mer evokes, a leisurely motor trip through the northern counties of England, shopping and theatre-going in Paris, and then a final fortnight on the Riviera. From the first day at sea, when the dimming shores of home had slipped away into the vaporous distance across the swinging, grey-green heave, Echo had thrown herself eagerly into the new experiences. It had seemed to her at first as though she was leaving behind all her pain and problem and flying whither the dogging ghosts could not follow. From time to time she felt a wave of that shame that had overwhelmed her as she sat in the court-room. When she reflected, she felt astonishment at her own temerity—at the morbid curiosity which had impelled her to witness the rehearsal of an episode whose very memory thrilled her with pain and dread. But at length this, too, had faded. She had told herself that Harry would have returned before her and that all would again be well between them. With all her power she had striven to thrust the pain and apprehension from the mind and amid new and varying scenes she had partially succeeded.