"Let me warn you, Draycott, that for every lie you're going to utter--and I can see from the look of you that you're going to tell nothing else but lies--I'll call you to an account; and don't flatter yourself that, however your friends may try to cover you, you'll escape me." As he answered, Draycott looked Anthony Dodwell very straight in the face. "I shall never be afraid of you again--never! Don't you suppose it!" "Don't you be so sure. You were afraid of me once; and, when you and I are again alone together, you'll be just as much afraid of me as you ever were. Gentlemen of your habits of body are only courageous when they know themselves to be in a position in which they are sure of being protected by their friends." "I don't think I ever was afraid of you, Dodwell; but you were a mystery to me, I didn't understand you, and I was a fool. But now I do understand you; if you were holding a revolver to my throat I shouldn't be afraid of the kind of man you are. I know you." Draycott turned to the girl. "You remember, Miss Forster, that on the night of the Easter ball you said something to me about that poker business?" "I remember quite well." "I'd been ashamed of myself a long time before that; but what you said to me made my shame greater than I could bear. All along I had had a feeling that if Beaton had gone under because of what had happened, of what I had said, then I was directly responsible for his undoing; although he had never done me a bad turn--I had done that to him. I understood that nothing had been heard of him, that he had disappeared. He might have committed suicide; I was haunted by a feeling that he had. If so, his blood was on my head." "From whom have you been learning all this fine language, Draycott?" The question came from Dodwell; it went unanswered. "I told myself, over and over again, that I would make a clean breast of it, that I would let everybody know that Beaton was a man of honour, and that I was not. But I had not found it easy, when it came to the point; in the first place, there was Dodwell; and then there was my--I suppose it was cowardice." "In anything in which you were concerned one can always count on your playing the coward." "But that night, after what you had said to me, I made up my mind that I could stand it no longer. I looked up Dodwell and I told him so. He laughed, as he always did; then when he saw I was in earnest----" "I saw you were drunk." "When he saw I was in earnest, he said that if I would turn up after the dance he would talk things over with me then." "I warn you once more--look after that tongue of yours." "I should advise you, Dodwell," struck in Clifford, "to begin by looking after your own. You keep on talking about Draycott's cowardice, while all the time you seem to be in mortal terror of what he is going to say." Noel Draycott continued as if he had not been interrupted. "When the others went upstairs I stayed behind." "But where were you?"