Draycott turned to the girl.
"You remember, Miss Forster, that on the night of the Easter ball you said something to me about that poker business?"
"I remember quite well."
"I'd been ashamed of myself a long time before that; but what you said to me made my shame greater than I could bear. All along I had had a feeling that if Beaton had gone under because of what had happened, of what I had said, then I was directly responsible for his undoing; although he had never done me a bad turn--I had done that to him. I understood that nothing had been heard of him, that he had disappeared. He might have committed suicide; I was haunted by a feeling that he had. If so, his blood was on my head."
"From whom have you been learning all this fine language, Draycott?"
The question came from Dodwell; it went unanswered.
"I told myself, over and over again, that I would make a clean breast of it, that I would let everybody know that Beaton was a man of honour, and that I was not. But I had not found it easy, when it came to the point; in the first place, there was Dodwell; and then there was my--I suppose it was cowardice."
"In anything in which you were concerned one can always count on your playing the coward."
"But that night, after what you had said to me, I made up my mind that I could stand it no longer. I looked up Dodwell and I told him so. He laughed, as he always did; then when he saw I was in earnest----"
"I saw you were drunk."