“You got Thatcher his divorce,” Carroll continued.  “And you know that he would never have got it but for me, and that everybody expected that I would marry Mrs. Thatcher when the thing was over.  And I didn’t, and everybody said I was a blackguard, and I was.  It was bad enough before, but I made it worse by not doing the only thing that could make it any better.  Why I didn’t do it I don’t know.  I had some grand ideas of reform about that time, I think, and I thought I owed my people something, and that by not making Mrs. Thatcher my mother’s daughter I would be saving her and my sisters.  It was remorse, I guess, and I didn’t see things straight.  I know now what I should have done.  Well, I left her and she went her own way, and a great many people felt sorry for her, and were good to her—­not your people, nor my people; but enough were good to her to make her see as much of the world as she had used to.  She never loved Thatcher, and she never loved any of the men you brought into that trial except one, and he treated her like a cur.  That was myself.  Well, what with trying to please my family, and loving Alice Thatcher all the time and not seeing her, and hating her too for bringing me into all that notoriety—­for I blamed the woman, of course, as a man always will—­I got to drinking, and then this scrape came and I had to run.  I don’t care anything about that row now, or what you believe about it.  I’m here, shut off from my home, and that’s a worse punishment than any damn lawyers can invent.  And the man’s well again.  He saw I was drunk; but I wasn’t so drunk that I didn’t know he was trying to do me, and I pounded him just as they say I did, and I’m sorry now I didn’t kill him.”

Holcombe stirred uneasily, and the man at his side lowered his voice and went on more calmly: 

“If I hadn’t been a gentleman, Holcombe, or if it had been another cabman he’d fought with, there wouldn’t have been any trouble about it.  But he thought he could get big money out of me, and his friends told him to press it until he was paid to pull out, and I hadn’t the money, and so I had to break bail and run.  Well, you’ve seen the place.  You’ve been here long enough to know what it’s like, and what I’ve had to go through.  Nobody wrote me, and nobody came to see me; not one of my own sisters even, though they’ve been in the Riviera all this spring—­not a day’s journey away.  Sometimes a man turned up that I knew, but it was almost worse than not seeing any one.  It only made me more homesick when he’d gone.  And for weeks I used to walk up and down that beach there alone late in the night, until I got to thinking that the waves were talking to me, and I got queer in my head.  I had to fight it just as I used to have to fight against whiskey, and to talk fast so that I wouldn’t think.  And I tried to kill myself hunting, and only got a broken collar-bone for my pains.  Well, all this time Alice was living in Paris and New York.  I heard