He held out his hand when Tony rose, and the younger man noticed how cold his fingers felt. “Good night, sir,” he said. “I trust you will feel brighter in the morning.”
The chilly fingers still detained him and Palliser said very quietly, “One never knows what may happen, Tony; but it would be my wish that you and Violet did not wait very long.”
Tony went out with a curious throbbing of his pulses and a horrible sense of degradation, for he knew that he had perjured himself to a dying man who trusted him. The room he entered was dimly lighted, but he knew where the spirit stand and siphon were kept, and a liberal measure of brandy was frothing in the glass, when there was a light step behind him and a hand touched his arm.
“No!” said a low voice with a little ring of command in it.
Tony started, and swinging round with a dark flush in his face saw Violet Wayne looking at him. There was also a little more color than usual in her cheeks, but her eyes were steady, which Tony’s were not.
“I never expected you, Violet,” he said. “You made me feel like a boy caught with his hand in the jam-pot. It’s humiliating as well as ludicrous!”
The girl smiled very faintly. “I am afraid it is,” she said. “Do you know, Tony, that this is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life?”
Tony saw the slight trembling of her lips, and laughed somewhat inanely as he held out his hands.
“I think I needed it!” he said; and in a sudden fit of rage seized the glass and, moving a few steps forward, flung it crashing into the grate. Then he turned and faced the girl, flushed to the forehead, but stirred to almost unwilling respect.
“There is not one woman of your station in a thousand who would have had the courage to do that,” he said. “Still, it is preposterous to think that there was the least reason for it.”