"What I have to tell you is in the main a record of faults and follies," began Dare when leave had been given him, "but I will make my narrative as brief as possible. Let me start by remarking that I have good blood in my veins, and can trace back my ancestry in a direct line for upwards of two hundred years. It was my misfortune to lose both my parents long before I was out of my teens. On coming of age I succeeded to a fortune of forty thousand pounds, the accumulated income of my minority. Thereupon I at once plunged into all the gayeties and temptations of town life, showering my guineas right and left with lavish hands, as if they could never come to an end. Cards, dice, and the turf helped me in turn on the downward road. I had no one to counsel or warn me. The person who had filled the post of guardian to me from the date of my father's death was himself a broken man of pleasure, who encouraged rather than restrained me in the road I was treading, and had no scruple about dipping his hand into my purse whenever he had been more than usually unlucky at the tables. "Then by and by I fell in love, or what at that time I believed to be love. But I know now, and have long known, that I was drawn to Miss Tighe as in the fable we read how hapless mariners were drawn to the sirens of the deep--because they had not enough will-power to resist their wiles. However, I was infatuated, and--which was all she cared about, for she was a compound of greed and selfishness--I lavished jewelry and presents upon her as if I could not do enough to make patent my folly. Thus it came to pass that my twenty-fourth birthday found my fortune reduced to a very few thousands. The end came shortly after with the elopement of Miss Tighe with the man whom (next to Dick Cortelyon) I had accounted my dearest friend. "I was still staggering from this blow when another of my 'dear friends,' by means of a forged cheque, contrived to defraud me of the poor wreck of my fortune, save a few paltry hundreds, before putting the Atlantic between himself and me. "It was not till ruin stared me in the face, and I knew not which way to turn, that I took to the 'road'--as many a broken-down spendthrift of as good birth as I has done before me. But it is some slight salve to my conscience to know that I have never eased any man of his purse who was not well able to bear the loss, that I have never despoiled one of the opposite sex, and that I have never failed to distribute among the poor more than half of all I have taken from the rich." He ceased, and for some moments neither of them broke the silence. His eyes had been fixed on the window as he told his tale, and he still kept them turned away from his companion. He was now softly tapping his teeth with the nails of one hand.