"Look here!" interrupted the quiet man, "I fancy I know Milburn better than most people, and he has a clean life behind him; moreover, he thinks you are the only man on earth. I can't understand how he can deliberately throw himself away, as you say he is doing. There is a very strong motive of some kind. He is not a man to take to dissipation for its own sake."
Frost's eye twinkled as he turned abruptly and fronted the speaker.
"Then you think he has a provocation?"
"He must have; I've observed him pretty closely, and there is an underlying streak of good metal in his character that will crop out at times. Say, Frost, have you tried to help him?"
"Always." An oppressive little silence followed, and Frost frowned as he tugged away at his mustache. "But I can do little with him of late."
"It is all very bad—very bad," said the quiet man.
"Though if he did a world of wrong, injuring every human creature that came between him and his pleasure, he should not be forsaken by you—he sticks to you."
Every line in the clear whiteness of Frost's face was cruelly, craftily, and closely compressed, while he stood looking at the man whose words were the
