He shook his head. But for that last sneering look of Craig's, that satiric challenge, he might have maintained a silence that would have seemed to her only a proper pride in himself and a deserved contempt for the whisper of malice. But the look and sneer had flicked him on the raw, had called to some element of naked honesty deep within him. In that second he had known, shame-stricken, that whatever the outcome there could be no evasion between them. There must be the truth. He was no longer what he had thought himself, but he would be no malingerer.
"Thank you," he said, "for that! Yet what Craig wished you to believe—was quite true."
She stared at him unbelievingly. "True!" Her lips formed rather than spoke the word.
"Yes. I was under the influence of liquor. But for that I should have won the case, I believe."
"But," she faltered, "I don't—understand. Why, I never saw you in—that condition in my life! I was there. I—I heard you speak."
"It is not the first time," he said steadily. "Nor the second, nor the third. Liquor helped me to win my cases. I thought I had made it my slave when it had made itself my master. This time it failed me. And I—I failed my client," he added bitterly.
She did not catch the note of pain, of deep contrition in his voice. Her own hurt was too keen. She only heard the high-built structures of her own ideals crumbling down about her feet. "So Craig was right!" she said under her breath.
"Don't think it is easy for me to tell you this," he went on. "It is because I must. All my life I have cared very little what others thought. But—you—I care what you think. I never knew how much till now, when I have thrown your good opinion of me in the dust!" He bent and took her hands. "Echo, is it the death of your ideal of me?"
Her lingers trembled in his grasp. Pictures were flashing before her mind—frost-stung October days when they had galloped with the baying hounds, over the blown, tinted leaves and russet fields—winter skating-parties on the frozen river, summer dances like that of to-night, for which the music was now swinging a hundred yards away—always it had been she and Harry Sevier. He had been so superior to the blandishments of the smaller vices. Others had failed and fallen; only he had remained on his pedestal, a type of brilliant accomplishment. She saw now his success as unenduring, fictitious, his talents besmirched with the vice that was most hateful to her. "Not the first time, nor the second, nor the third!" In their own circle she had seen the dreadful cycle more than once repeated—the slow, baleful fastening of habit, the struggle, the piteous, ignoble yielding and the final slipping down to degraded depths from which there could be no resurrection. There was Chilly, her own twin-brother, with his feet set on the same primrose path. And now was it to be Harry Sevier? She shuddered and drew her hand from his clasp.
"I—see," he said, in a slow, even voice. "You can't trust me." It was not the Sevier that had kissed her hand who spoke now, but one whom that gesture seemed to have flung an infinite distance from her.