“You have given me your promise,” said Sylvia.  “There will be no cards, no bets.”

Walter Hine laughed bitterly.

“I shan’t break it.  I have had my lesson.  By Jove, I have.”

Walter Hine traveled to Waterloo and drove straight to the office of Mr. Jarvice.

“I owe some money,” he began, bleating the words out the moment he was ushered into the inner office.

Mr. Jarvice grinned.

“This interview is concluded,” he said.  “There’s the door.”

“I owe it to a friend, Captain Barstow,” Hine continued, in desperation.  “A thousand pounds.  He has written for it.  He says that debts of honor between gentlemen—­” But he got no further, for Mr. Jarvice broke in upon his faltering explanations with a snarl of contempt.

“Barstow!  You poor little innocent.  I have something else to do with my money than to pour it into Barstow’s pockets.  I know the man.  Send him to me to-morrow, and I’ll talk to him—­as between gentlemen.”

Walter Hine flushed.  He had grown accustomed to deference and flatteries in the household of Garratt Skinner.  The unceremonious scorn of Mr. Jarvice stung his vanity, and vanity was the one strong element of his character.  He was in the mind hotly to defend Captain Barstow from Mr. Jarvice’s insinuations, but he refrained.

“Then Barstow will know that I draw my allowance from you, and not from my grandfather,” he stammered.  There was the trouble for Walter Hine.  If Barstow knew, Garratt Skinner would come to know.  There would be an end to the deference and the flatteries.  He would no longer be able to pose as the favorite of the great millionaire, Joseph Hine.  He would sink in Sylvia’s eyes.  At the cost of any humiliation that downfall must be avoided.

His words, however, had an immediate effect upon Mr. Jarvice, though for quite other reasons.

“Why, that’s true,” said Mr. Jarvice, slowly, and in a voice suddenly grown smooth.  “Yes, yes, we don’t want to mix up my name in the affair at all.  Sit down, Mr. Hine, and take a cigar.  The box is at your elbow.  Young men of spirit must have some extra license allowed to them for the sake of the promise of their riper years.  I was forgetting that.  No, we don’t want my name to appear at all, do we?”

Publicity had no charms for Mr. Jarvice.  Indeed, on more than one occasion he had found it quite a hindrance to the development of his little plans.  To go his own quiet way, unheralded by the press and unacclaimed of men—­that was the modest ambition of Mr. Jarvice.

“However, I don’t look forward to handing over a thousand pounds to Captain Barstow,” he continued, softly.  “No, indeed.  Did you lose any of your first quarter’s allowance to him besides the thousand?”

Walter Hine lit his cigar and answered reluctantly: 

“Yes.”

“All of it?”

“Oh no, no, not all of it.”