th. If the man had not been dead, I might
have ended by breaking it--who knows? What I have to tell you is that,
some two months after the Relief, when your engagement to the lady who is
now your wife was first made public, I, impelled and prompted by a
despicable envy of the great good-fortune that had fallen--deservedly
fallen--to your lot, sought out Miss Mildare, and told her--something I
had learned to your detriment, from a man called Brooker, a babbling,
worthless creature, a Gueldersdorp tradesman who, on the strength of a
seat upon the local Bench, claimed to be informed."

Saxham's head turned stiffly. He looked at the wall now instead of the
floor, and breathed unevenly and quickly. His right hand, resting on the
table near which he sat, softly closed and opened, opened and closed its
supple muscular fingers, with a curious, rhythmical movement. He waited to
hear more. And Julius groaned out, with his elbows on the parted wooden
mantelshelf, and his shamed face hidden:

"I knew that the man lied--on my soul, I knew it! But the opportunity he
had given me of lowering your value in--in another's eyes was too tempting
to resist. The man had told me----"

"In effect, that I was a confirmed and hopeless drunkard," said Saxham;
"and, as it happens, he told the truth!" He added: "And what I was then I
am now. There is no change in me, though once I thought it!"

"Saxham!... For God's sake, Saxham!" stuttered Julius. But Saxham,
hunching his great shoulders, and lowering his square, black head, not at
all unlike the savage bull of Lady Hannah Wrynche's apt comparison, went
on:

"It is a drunken world we live in, Parson, for all our sham of abstinence
and sobriety. But there are nice degrees and various grades in our
drunkenness, as in our other vices, and the man who is a druggard despises
the common drunkard; and the sippers of ether look down with infinite
contempt--or, more ludicrous still, with tender, pitying sorrow, upon the
toper and the slave of morphia and cocaine, and take no shame in seeing
the oxygenated greyhound win the coursing-match and the oxygenated
racehorse run for the Cup! A year or so, and the Transatlantic
oxygen-outfit will be an indispensable equipment of the British athlete.
Even to-day the professional footballer and cricketer, runner and swimmer,
inhale oxygen as a preliminary to effort, and bring the false energy that
is born of it to aid them in their trial tests of strength. The man