Richard hesitated and coloured as though with shame. Rex burst again into noisy laughter.
'You think I am not myself, eh! that I have had a little of the devil's liquor,' but Richard's grave pitying glance subdued him. 'Don't be hard on me, Dick, it was the first time, and I was so horribly weak and had dragged myself for miles, and I wanted strength to see her again. I hated it even as I took it, but it has answered its purpose.'
'Richard, oh, Richard!' and at Mildred's tone of anguish Richard went up to her and put his arms round her.
'You must leave him to me, Aunt Milly. I must take him home; he has excited himself and taken what is not good for him, and so he cannot control himself as well as usual. Of course it is wrong, but he did not mean it, I am sure. Poor Rex, he will repent of it bitterly to-morrow if I can only persuade him to leave this place.'
But Mildred's tears had already sobered Roy; his manner as he stood looking at them was half ashamed and half resentful.
'Why are you both so hard on me?' he burst out at last; 'when a fellow's heart is broken he is not always as careful as he should be. I felt so deadly faint climbing the hill in the sun that I took too much of what they offered as a restorative; only Dick is such a saint that he can't make allowances for people.'
'I will make every allowance if you will only come home with me now,' pleaded his brother.
'Where—home? Oh, Dick, you should not ask it,' returned Roy, turning very pale; 'I cannot, I must not go home while she is there. I should betray myself—it would be worse than madness.'
'He is right,' assented Mildred; 'he must go back to London, but you cannot leave him, Richard.'
'Yes, back to London—Jericho if you will; it is all one and the same to me since I have lost my Polly. I left my traps at an inn five miles from here where I slept, or rather woke, last night. I shouldn't wonder if you have to carry me on your back, Dick, or leave me lying by the roadside, if that faintness comes on again.'