"Better still, you can then go on?"
The vagrant looked at his companion as if to say: "Since I've known you—seen you—I have thought that I might." But he said nothing more, and Bulstrode, reading a diffidence which did not displease him, finished:
"You shall go on, and I'll help you."
The stranger bowed his head, and the wine sent the color up until his cheeks took the flush of health. Remaining a little bent over, his eyes on his feet clad in Bulstrode's shoes, he said:
"I'm an Englishman. My family is everything that's decent and all that, you know, and proud. We've first-rate traditions. I'm a younger son, and I've always been a thorn in the family's side. I've been a sort of vagabond from the first, but never as bad as they thought or believed."
He paused. His recital was painful to him. Bulstrode waited, then knocking off the ash from his cigar, urged:
"Tell me about it, tell me frankly; it will, you see, be a relief. We can do better that way—if I know."
The stranger looked up at him quickly, then leaning forward in his chair, talked as it were to the carpet, and rapidly:
"It's just a year ago. I'd been going it rather hard and got into trouble more or less—lost at cards and the races, and been running up a lot of bills. My father was awfully down on me. I'd gone home for the holidays and had a talk with my father and asked him to pay up for me just this once more. He refused, and we got very angry, both of us, and separated in a rage. The house was full of people—a Christmas ball and a tree. My father had, so it happened, quite a lot of money in the house. I knew where it was—I had seen him count it and put it away. That night for some reason the whole thing sickened me, in the mess I was in, and I left and went up to London without even saying good-by. In the course of the week my brother came and found me drunk in my rooms. It seems that the money had been taken from my father's safe, and they accused me."
"But," interrupted Bulstrode, eagerly, "it was a simple thing to exculpate yourself."