"Don't mention it, Mr. Griffith! It's—it's the most positive proof of your friendship for him—that you should have been so angered. Deuce take it, I'd give anything if this hadn't happened!"
"How did it happen?" asked Griffith. "Sit down—No; no chance of his coming out now."
Lord James slipped off his heavy topcoat, and seated himself, his dress clothes and immaculate linen offering an odd contrast to the shabby room. But the engineer looked only at the face of his visitor.
"It's a beastly shame—when he was holding his own so well!" exclaimed the Englishman.
"That's what gets me," said Griffith. "He seemed to have staved it off indefinitely. I didn't notice a single one of the usual signs. And he has let out that the dam was almost a certainty. If he had fizzled on it, I could understand how that and the way he's been grinding indoors night and day—"
"No; he's stood that better than I had feared. What a shame! what a beastly shame! When Miss Leslie learns—"
"Miss Leslie?" cut in Griffith. "If she shakes him for this, she's not much account—after all he did for her. If she's worth anything, now's the time for her to set to and help pull him up again. But you haven't said yet how it happened."
"That's the worst of it! To be sure, she was perfectly innocent. She must have thought it simply impossible that the communion wine—"
"Hey!—communion wine? That's what he meant by church saloons and religious lushing, then. She steered him up against that—knowing his one weakness?"
"My dear sir, how could she realize?"