h or how little I took that evening! I can swear
it was the smaller half of either bottle--and the second we never
finished--but the amount matters nothing. Even me it did not make
grossly tipsy. But it warmed my blood, it cheered my heart, it excited
my brain, and--it loosened my tongue. It set me talking with a freedom
of which I should have been incapable in my normal moments, on a subject
whereof I had never before spoken of my own free will. And yet the will
to--speak--to my present companion--was no novelty. I had felt it at our
first meeting in the private hotel. His tact, his sympathy, his handsome
face, his personal charm, his frank friendliness, had one and all
tempted me to bore this complete stranger with unsolicited confidences
for which an inquisitive relative might have angled in vain. And the
temptation was the stronger because I knew in my heart that I should
not bore the young squire at all; that he was anxious enough to hear my
story from my own lips, but too good a gentleman intentionally to
betray such anxiety. Vanity was also in the impulse. A vulgar newspaper
prominence had been my final (and very genuine) tribulation; but to
please and to interest one so pleasing and so interesting to me, was
another and a subtler thing. And then there was his sympathy--shall I
add his admiration?--for my reward.

I do not pretend that I argued thus deliberately in my heated and
excited brain. I merely hold that all these small reasons and motives
were there, fused and exaggerated by the liquor which was there as well.
Nor can I say positively that Rattray put no leading questions; only
that I remember none which had that sound; and that, once started, I am
afraid I needed only too little encouragement to run on and on.

Well, I was set going before we got up from the table. I continued in
an armchair that my host dragged from a little book-lined room adjoining
the hall. I finished on my legs, my back to the fire, my hands beating
wildly together. I had told my dear Rattray of my own accord more than
living man had extracted from me yet. He interrupted me very little;
never once until I came to the murderous attack by Santos on the drunken
steward.

"The brute!" cried Rattray. "The cowardly, cruel, foreign devil! And you
never let out one word of that!"

"What was the good?" said I. "They are all gone now--all gone to their
account. Every man of us was a brute at the last. There was nothing to
be gained by te