ny man the mastery which it had gained over him,
and he knew that unless he conquered the habit, he would soon be a slave
to it, body and soul. An evening spent in the society of a good woman,
moreover, had aroused his latent manhood, and he felt that he could not
degrade himself by standing by the challenge he had made. He knew as
well as they that it was made under the influence of whisky, and that no
man of honour should stand by it.

During the days he had been fighting his craving for drink, the thought
of what he had done became more and more repugnant, and when he entered
the room where Sprague and Purvis were, he intended telling them that
nothing more must be said about it.

It seemed, however, that the fates were against him. He was in a
nervous, irritable mood, caused by his abstention from the poison which
had become almost a necessity to him, and the significant glances of the
two men maddened him. Had they met him in the right spirit, it is
possible that the affair, which did not reflect credit upon any of them,
might have been dismissed as an idle joke. As we have seen, however,
they had taunted him, they had aroused him to anger; these men whom he
regarded as his inferiors had assumed an air of superiority, and this in
the present state of his nerves was more than he could bear. He had
ordered whisky, and after that his good resolutions went by the board.
Radford Leicester would have died rather than have confessed himself
beaten. Thus do great issues often rest upon unimportant events.

After he had gone a silence fell between the two young men for some
time.

"I wish we hadn't been such fools, Sprague," said Purvis presently.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that we are as bad as he is, perhaps worse. We at least were
sober."

"Yes, I know; but who would have thought that he would stand by his
guns?"

"We know what he is. I believe if we had been wise to-night he might
have been led to give it up. But now nothing will move him."

"Well, it may teach Miss Castlemaine a lesson," said Sprague, whose
pride had not yet recovered from the wound which her refusal had made;
"but there--it's all right. It'll never come to anything. For that
matter, if anything serious came of it, I would tell her the whole
history of the joke."

"No, you wouldn't."

"Why?"

"Because you dare not. Because she would despise us all to our last day,
because she would never speak to us again. You know the kind of girl