They looked up, startled. Blake stood close to them, at the end of the table, with his soft hat in his half-raised left hand, and his shaggy fur coat hanging limp from his bowed shoulders. He stood with perfect steadiness. Only in the fixed stare of his bloodshot eyes and the twitching of the muscles in his gray-white face could they perceive the mental stress and excitement under which he was laboring.
"Tom!" stammered the Englishman. "You here!"
"Couldn't get Ashton started," replied Blake. His voice was hoarse and rasping but not thick. Though he spoke slowly, his enunciation was distinct. "His man just carried him out. I've been waiting to slip out, unseen, this way. I ask you to excuse me. Long's I'm here, I'll make the best of it I can. Congratulations to you! Best man wins!"
While he was speaking, Genevieve had drawn her hand out of the unconscious clasp of Lord James and slowly risen from her chair. Her face was as white as Blake's; her eyes were wide with fear and pity and horror.
"You!—how could you do it?" she gasped. "When I had given you the second chance—to fail again!" The sight of his powerful jaw, clenched and resolute, stung her into an outburst of angry scorn. "Fail, fail! always fail! yet with that look of strength! To come here with that look, after failing again so utterly, miserably—in my house! You coward!"
"That's it," assented Blake in a dead monotone. "Only pity is you couldn't see it sooner. But you know me now. Ought to 've known me from the first. I didn't get drunk there in Mozambique 'cause I hadn't the stuff. You might have known that. But now it's settled. I've proved myself a brute and a fizzle—been proving it ever since Ashton got a bottle and showed me into a little room. We've been guzzling whiskey in there ever since. His man took him out dead drunk. So far I'm only—"
"Tom!" broke in Lord James. "No more of that! Tell the truth—tell her why you did it!"
"Tell her—when she's guessed already. But if you say so, Jimmy—It's the first time I ever owned up I'm a quitter. Great joke that, when all my life I haven't been anything else,—hobo, fizzle, quitter, bum—"
"Gad! Not that drivel! If you can't explain to her, then keep silent."
"No, I don't keep silent till I've had my say," rejoined Blake morosely. "Needn't think I don't know just what I'm saying and what I'm doing." His voice harshened and broke with a despair that was all the more terrible for the deadness of his tone. "God! That's why the whiskey won't work. I've poured it down like water, but it's no use—it won't work! I can't forget I've lost out!"