"I've quit that more or less," he assured her. "Still, I have been taking some these last few days. Finding Katharine over here with Jocelyn Thew hanging around gave me kind of a shock." "You weren't best pleased to see them together, I should think, were you?" "No," he admitted, a little sullenly. "You're angry with him, aren't you?" "Kind of," he confessed. "I wouldn't have complained at anything he'd asked me to do, but it was a low-down trick to get Katharine into this trouble." His eyes shone out with a dull anger. She watched him curiously. "Dick, you're not the boy you were," she sighed. "Guess you're sorry you ever came to that supper party at the Knickerbocker, aren't you?" He turned and looked at her. He was only twenty-two years old, but there were things in his face from which a man might have shrunk. "Yes, I am sorry," he confessed. "I am not blaming anybody but I shall be sorry all my life." "Jocelyn Thew treated you very much as he did me," she went on. "He carried you off your feet. You thought him the most wonderful thing that ever lived. It was the same with me. He has never given as much of himself as his little finger, never even looked at me as though I were a human being, but I'd have scrubbed floors for him a month after we first met. It was just the same with you, only you were a man. You'd have committed murder for his sake, a week after that party." "Murder!" He gave a sudden start, a start that amazed her. His hand was upon her shoulder. His eyes, red with fury, were blazing into hers. "What's that you're saying, Nora? What's that?" She was speechless, paralysed by that little staccato cry. A group of people near looked around. She laughed shrilly to cover the intensity of the moment. "No need to get excited!" she exclaimed. "Pull yourself together," she went on, under her breath. "Waiter, two more cocktails." He recovered himself almost at once, but the strained look was there about his mouth. "Nerves, you see," he muttered. "I shall be all right again when I get back to France." She laid her hand gently upon his arm. "Dick," she said, "you are often upon my conscience. You were such a nice boy, back in those days. Everything that's happened to you seems to have happened since you met Jocelyn Thew that night. He has got some sort of a hold, hasn't he? What is it?" The young man moistened his dry lips. The waiter brought their cocktails and he drank his greedily. "I'll tell you, Nora," he promised. "Perhaps it'll do me good to listen how the story sounds as I tell it. First of all, let us have the thing straight. Jocelyn Thew never helped me into trouble. I was in it, right up to the neck, when I met him." "You kept it to yourself," she murmured curiously.