Leila, you know I'm not a bad man at heart.

Can't you help a fellow ?" His manner, completely changed, had become the resentful and fretful appeal of the victim of plot and circumstance.

All the savage brutality had been eliminated; the sneer, the truculent attempts to browbeat, the pitiful swagger, the cynical justification, all were gone.

It was really the man himself now, normally scared and repentant; the frightened, overfed pensioner on his wife's bounty; not the human beast maddened by fear and dissipation, half stunned, half panic-stricken, driven by sheer terror into a role which even he shrank from--had shrunk from all these years.

For, leech and parasite that he was, Mortimer, however much the dirty acquisition of money might tempt him in theory, had not yet brought himself to the point of attempting the practice, even when in sorest straits and bitterest need.