“You are interested in the muddle down at Westminster?” he asked, sarcastically.

“I—?” It was the turn of the stranger to draw back a step.  “Oh, I read my newspaper with the other five million, that is all.  I am an outsider.”  His voice sounded curt; the warmth that admiration had brought into it a moment before had frozen abruptly.

“An outsider!” Chilcote repeated.  “What an enviable word!”

“Possibly, to those who are well inside the ring.  But let us go back to Lexington.  What a pinnacle the man reached, and what a drop he had!  It has always seemed to me an extraordinary instance of the human leaven running through us all.  What was the real cause of his collapse?” he asked, suddenly.  “Was it drugs or drink?  I have often wished to get at the truth.”

Again Chilcote changed his attitude.

“Is truth ever worth getting at?” he asked, irrelevantly.

“In the case of a public man—­yes.  He exchanges his privacy for the interest of the masses.  If he gives the masses the details of his success, why not the details of his failure?  But was it drink that sucked him under?”

“No.”  Chilcote’s response came after a pause.

“Drugs?”

Again Chilcote hesitated.  And at the moment of his indecision a woman brushed past him, laughing boisterously.  The sound jarred him.

“Was it drugs?” the stranger went on easily.  “I have always had a theory that it was.”

“Yes.  It was morphia.”  The answer came before Chilcote had realized it.  The woman’s laugh at the stranger’s quiet persistence had contrived to draw it from him.  Instantly he had spoken he looked about him quickly, like one who has for a moment forgotten a necessary vigilance.

There was silence while the stranger thought over the information just given him.  Then he spoke again, with a new touch of vehemence.

“So I imagined,” he said.  “Though, on my soul, I never really credited it.  To have gained so much, and to have thrown it away for a common vice!” He made an exclamation of disgust.

Chilcote gave an unsteady laugh.  “You judge hardly.” he said.

The other repeated his sound of contempt.  “Justly so.  No man has the right to squander what another would give his soul for.  It lessens the general respect for power.”

“You are a believer in power?” The tone was sarcastic, but the sarcasm sounded thin.

“Yes.  All power is the outcome of individuality, either past or present.  I find no sentiment for the man who plays with it.”

The quiet contempt of the tone stung Chilcote.

“Do you imagine that Lexington made no fight?” he asked, impulsively.  “Can’t you picture the man’s struggle while the vice that had been slave gradually became master?” He stopped to take breath, and in the cold pause that followed it seemed to him that the other made a murmur of incredulity.