rce," Carroll continued. "And you know that
he would never have got it but for me, and that everybody expected
that I would marry Mrs. Thatcher when the thing was over. And I
didn't, and everybody said I was a blackguard, and I was. It was bad
enough before, but I made it worse by not doing the only thing that
could make it any better. Why I didn't do it I don't know. I had some
grand ideas of reform about that time, I think, and I thought I owed
my people something, and that by not making Mrs. Thatcher my mother's
daughter I would be saving her and my sisters. It was remorse, I
guess, and I didn't see things straight. I know now what I should have
done. Well, I left her and she went her own way, and a great many
people felt sorry for her, and were good to her--not your people, nor
my people; but enough were good to her to make her see as much of the
world as she had used to. She never loved Thatcher, and she never
loved any of the men you brought into that trial except one, and he
treated her like a cur. That was myself. Well, what with trying to
please my family, and loving Alice Thatcher all the time and not
seeing her, and hating her too for bringing me into all that
notoriety--for I blamed the woman, of course, as a man always will--I
got to drinking, and then this scrape came and I had to run. I don't
care anything about that row now, or what you believe about it. I'm
here, shut off from my home, and that's a worse punishment than any
damn lawyers can invent. And the man's well again. He saw I was drunk;
but I wasn't so drunk that I didn't know he was trying to do me, and I
pounded him just as they say I did, and I'm sorry now I didn't kill
him."

Holcombe stirred uneasily, and the man at his side lowered his voice
and went on more calmly:

"If I hadn't been a gentleman, Holcombe, or if it had been another
cabman he'd fought with, there wouldn't have been any trouble about
it. But he thought he could get big money out of me, and his friends
told him to press it until he was paid to pull out, and I hadn't the
money, and so I had to break bail and run. Well, you've seen the
place. You've been here long enough to know what it's like, and what
I've had to go through. Nobody wrote me, and nobody came to see me;
not one of my own sisters even, though they've been in the Riviera all
this spring--not a day's journey away. Sometimes a man turned up that
I knew, but it was almost worse than not seeing any one. It only mad