t him. If I'd not had a drink in a year, I'd have hit him just as
quick and just as hard."

"Can't you see," said the girl, "that in being not yourself when I was
in your care you were much more insulting to me than any cabman could
possibly be? When you are like that you have no respect for me, or for
yourself. Part of my pride in you is that you are so strong, that you
control yourself, that common pleasures never get a hold on you. If
you couldn't control your temper I wouldn't blame you, because you've a
villainous temper and you were born with it. But you weren't born with
a taste for liquor. None of your people drank. You never drank until
you went into the army. If I were a man," declared the girl, "I'd be
ashamed to admit anything was stronger than I was. You never let pain
beat you. I've seen you play polo with a broken arm, but in this you
give pain to others, you shame and humiliate the one you pretend to
love, just because you are weak, just because you can't say 'no.'"

Aintree laughed angrily.

"Drink has no hold on me," he protested. "It affects me as much as the
lights and the music affect a girl at her first dance, and no more.
But, if you ask me to stop--"

"I do not!" said the girl. "If you stop, you'll stop not because I
have any influence over you, but because you don't need my influence.
If it's wrong, if it's hurting you, if it's taking away your usefulness
and your power for good, that's why you'll stop. Not because a girl
begs you. Or you're not the man I think you."

Aintree retorted warmly. "I'm enough of a man for this," he protested:
"I'm enough of a man not to confess I can't drink without making a
beast of myself. It's easy not to drink at all. But to stop altogether
is a confession of weakness. I'd look on my doing that as cowardly. I
give you my word--not that I'll swear off, that I'll never do--but I
promise you you'll have no further reason to be what you call
humiliated, or ashamed. You have my word for it."

A week later Aintree rode his pony into a railway cutting and rolled
with it to the tracks below, and, if at the time he had not been
extremely drunk, would have been killed. The pony, being quite sober,
broke a leg and was destroyed.

When word of this came to Helen she was too sick at heart to see
Aintree, and by others it was made known to him that on the first
steamer Miss Scott would return North. Aintree knew why she was going,
knew she had lost f