y alive. Something possessed
him, and he possessed his hearers.

"It was just as I said and knew--my horse, Flamingo, stretched away
from the rest at Tattenham Corner and came sailing away home two lengths
ahead. It was a sight to last a lifetime, and that was what I meant it
to be for me. The race was all Flamingo's own, and the mob was going
wild, when all of a sudden a woman--the widow of a racing-man gone
suddenly mad--rushed out in front of the horse, snatched at its bridle
with a shrill cry and down she came, and down Flamingo and the jockey
came, a melee of crushed humanity. And that was how I lost my last two
thousand five hundred pounds, as I said at the Logan Trial."

"Oh! Oh!" said Kitty Tynan, her face aflame, her eyes like topaz suns,
her hands wringing. "Oh, that was--oh, poor Flamingo!" she added.

A strange smile shot into Crozier's face, and the dark passion of
reminiscence fled from his eyes. "Yes, you are right, little friend,"
he said. "That was the real tragedy after all. There was the horse doing
his best, his most beautiful best, as though he knew so much depended on
him, stretching himself with the last ounce of energy he could summon,
feeling the psalm of success in his heart--yes, he knows, he knows what
he has done, none so well!--and out comes a black, hateful thing against
him, and down he goes, his game over, his course run. I felt exactly as
you do, and I felt that before everything else when it happened. Then I
felt for myself afterwards, and I felt it hard, as you can think."

The break went from his voice, but it rang with reflective, remembered
misery. "I was ruined. One thing was clear to me. I would not live on
my wife's money. I would not eat and drink what her money bought. No,
I would not live on my wife. Her brother, a good enough, impulsive lad,
with a tongue of his own and too small to thresh, came to me in London
the night of the race. He said his sister had been in the country-down
at Epsom--and that she bitterly resented my having broken my promise and
lost all I had. He said he had never seen her so angry, and he gave me
a letter from her. On her return to town she had been obliged to go
away at once to see her sister taken suddenly ill. He added, with an
unfeeling jibe, that he wouldn't like the reading of the letter himself.
If he hadn't been such a chipmunk of a fellow I'd have wrung his neck. I
put the letter her letter-in my pocket, and next day gave my lawyer full