Craig regarded him with a veiled smile that was half a sneer. The apparition had come at a fateful moment. Then his glance passed to Echo. "May I ask," he said, "whether you have yet cross-examined Mr. Sevier?" He bowed and went quickly up the path toward the lighted piazzas. There ensued a silence in which two minds travelled far. Echo had sat down upon the bench, her face averted. Her anger had faded out and her heart was hammering at the thought that Harry had heard, in her defence of him, what was in truth a confession. Across the aching interval broke the wanton bubble of a whip-poor-will. "Echo--" he said in a muffled voice. She looked up at him in the feathery light. "You heard--I wish you hadn't. Yet I couldn't help it! That ridiculous slur! But you can't possibly imagine that--that any one who knows you--" He stopped her with an abrupt gesture. "Wait. I want to--I must tell you something." "No, no!" she protested. "You shall not! I need no assurance. Do you think that I--" He shook his head. But for that last sneering look of Craig's, that satiric challenge, he might have maintained a silence that would have seemed to her only a proper pride in himself and a deserved contempt for the whisper of malice. But the look and sneer had flicked him on the raw, had called to some element of naked honesty deep within him. In that second he had known, shame-stricken, that whatever the outcome there could be no evasion between them. There must be the truth. He was no longer what he had thought himself, but he would be no malingerer. "Thank you," he said, "for that! Yet what Craig wished you to believe--was quite true." She stared at him unbelievingly. "True!" Her lips formed rather than spoke the word. "Yes. I _was_ under the influence of liquor. But for that I should have won the case, I believe." "But," she faltered, "I don't--understand. Why, I never saw you in--that condition in my life! I was there. I--I heard you speak." "It is not the first time," he said steadily. "Nor the second, nor the third. Liquor helped me to win my cases. I thought I had made it my slave when it had made itself my master. This time it failed me. And I--I failed my client," he added bitterly. She did not catch the note of pain, of deep contrition in his voice. Her own hurt was too keen. She only heard the high-built structures of her own ideals crumbling down about her feet. "So Craig was right!" she said under her breath. "Don't think it is easy for me to tell you this," he went on. "It is because I must. All my life I have cared very little what others thought. But--you--I care what you think. I never knew how much till now, when I have thrown your good opinion of me in the dust!" He bent and took her hands. "Echo, is it the death of your ideal of me?"