"I've helped myself once too often, Spencer. And I can't take the hand of an honest man, for reasons. You've got it at once." Spencer had average brains, but he was not very quick to realise the meaning of unexpected situations. At first, he thought the little man had been drinking. "Sit down, Tommy, and get it off your chest. What in the name of wonder is the matter?" he said kindly. He was rather fond of Tommy in a casual sort of way. Esmond did not sit down at once, but went over to the sideboard, and mixed himself a stiff tumbler of whisky-and-soda. He gulped it down at a draught, and then took an armchair. "You won't begrudge me that, I know," he said, speaking in the same strained, hoarse voice. "It's the last drink I'll have in your rooms, the last drink in any house in England, I should say. I'm done for, old man, to-morrow I clear out, eat my heart away in some beastly foreign hole." No, Spencer's first surmise had been incorrect. The man was not drunk, not even elevated. His face was chalk-white, and he was trembling all over as if he had been stricken with palsy. But he was perfectly sober. Spencer took a chair himself, and spoke a little sternly. "Pull yourself together, old man, and speak out. At first I thought you had had a drop too much. But I see that's not the case. Out with it. You've been waiting some time, my man informs me. You want to tell me something. Tell it." Tommy Esmond moistened his dry lips with his tongue, and spoke. "I don't quite know what instinct prompted me to come to you. We haven't known each other so very intimately, after all, but I always felt you were a bit more of a Christian than the other chaps I have known, less of a Pharisee--that you would be more likely to find excuses for a poor devil who had yielded to temptation." "Do get on," said Spencer a little impatiently. He did not at all like the turn the conversation was taking. Tommy spoke brokenly, he could not put his words together very coherently, it appeared. But his halting utterance was simply due to emotion. "I was at Elsinore Gardens to-night, playing cards. You know Elsinore Gardens, Mrs L'Estrange's flat?" He was quite sober, but his agitation made him wander a bit, or he would not have put the question. "Of course I know Mrs L'Estrange's flat. It was you who took me there," said Spencer. "Yes, we went there on the night of the raid, but I was not playing at your table. I remember you lost, and I won. Well, somebody has to lose, and somebody else has to win." Spencer made no comment on this obvious truism. Tommy Esmond again moistened his dry lips with his tongue. He was a long time in coming to the point, but he came to it at last.