moked fiercely until
the flame lit up his face. "It's the bitterest humiliation of my life,
Harry, the last straw!"

CHAPTER VII

REBELLION

For a moment Harry Randall said nothing, then deliberately he glanced up
and met his friend's eyes direct.

"Begin at the beginning and tell me the whole story," he said soberly. "I
had no idea the thing was really so serious."

"Well, it is, take that for granted. It's likely to be the end, so far as
I am concerned."

"Cut that out, Steve," shortly. "It's melodramatic and cheap. Things
can't be so bad if we look at them sanely." He hesitated, and went on
with distinct effort. "To begin with, I'm going to ask you a question. I
hate it, you know that without my telling you, but things have gone too
far to mince matters evidently. I've heard a number of times lately that
you were drinking. Is it so?"

"Who told you that?" hotly.

"Never mind who. I tell you I never believed a word of it until you
mentioned the president's warning. Now--Is it so?"

Armstrong's face went red,--red to the roots of his hair,--then slowly
shaded white until it was ghastly pale.

"Yes; it's useless, it seems, to deny it. That others knew, were talking
about it, though--It's true, Harry. I admit it."

Slowly, slowly, Randall knocked the ashes out of the pipe-bowl and put it
away in a drawer of the table.

"Very well, Steve. I shan't moralize. None of us men are so good we can
afford to begin throwing stones.... Let's go back a bit to the beginning.
There must be one somewhere, a cause. Just what's the trouble, old man?"

"Trouble!" It was the spark to tinder, the lead at last. "Everything,
Harry, everything." A halt for composure. "I suppose if I were to pick
out one single thing, though, that was worse than another, it's my
writing. I think, I know, that's what brought on the whole cursed mess.
Until my last book failed I had hope and the sun shone. When that went
down--down like a lump of lead--I haven't been able to do a thing, care
for a thing since. My brain simply quit work too. It died, and the best
of me died with it."

"And you began to drink."

"Yes, like a fish. Why not, since I was dead and it helped me to
forget?"

"Steve! I hate to preach, it doesn't become me; but--"

"Preach if you want to; you can't hurt my feelings now." Armstrong grew
calm, for the first time that evening. "When a fellow has worked as I
have worked for years, and hoped against hope, and stil