However, to go on with what I was telling you, the very night before--it happened--he came in to see me, looking like nothing on earth.

He cried like a baby, behaved like a lunatic, and called himself all manner of names.

He had had a great deal too much to drink, and I gathered that he had seen something horrible.
It was then he asked me to dine with him the next night, and told me that he was going to break altogether with his new friends.

Something in connection with them seemed to have given him a terrible fright." Francis nodded.

He had the tact to abandon his curiosity at this precise point.
"The old story," he declared, "bad company and rotten habits.