“And why can’t you go?” he repeated.

“I can’t tell you.”

“Oh, surely,” said Mr. Jarvice, with a scarcely perceptible sneer.  “Come now!  Between gentlemen!  Well?”

Walter Hine yielded to Jarvice’s insistence.

“There’s a girl,” he said, with a coy and odious smile.

Mr. Jarvice beat upon his desk with his fists in a savage anger.  His carefully calculated plan was to be thwarted by a girl.

“She’s a dear,” cried Walter Hine.  Having made the admission, he let himself go.  His vanity pricked him to lyrical flights.  “She’s a dear, she’s a sob, she would never let me go, she’s my little girl.”

Such was Sylvia’s reward for engaging in a struggle which she loathed for the salvation of Walter Hine.  She was jubilantly claimed by him as his little girl in a money-lender’s office.  Mr. Jarvice swore aloud.

“Who is she?” he asked, sternly.

A faint sense of shame came over Walter Hine.  He dimly imagined what Sylvia would have thought and said, and what contempt her looks would have betrayed, had she heard him thus boast of her goodwill.

“You are asking too much, Mr. Jarvice,” he said.

Mr. Jarvice waved the objection aside.

“Of course I ask it as between gentlemen,” he said, with an ironical politeness.

“Well, then, as between gentlemen,” returned Walter Hine, seriously.  “She is the daughter of a great friend of mine, Mr. Garratt Skinner.  What’s the matter?” he cried; and there was reason for his cry.

It had been an afternoon of surprises for Mr. Jarvice, but this simple mention of the name of Garratt Skinner was more than a surprise.  Mr. Jarvice was positively startled.  He leaned back in his chair with his mouth open and his eyes staring at Walter Hine.  The high color paled in his face and his cheeks grew mottled.  It seemed that fear as well as surprise came to him in the knowledge that Garratt Skinner was a friend of Walter Hine.

“What is the matter?” repeated Hine.

“It’s nothing,” replied Mr. Jarvice, hastily.  “The heat, that is all.”  He crossed the room, and throwing up the window leaned for a few moments upon the sill.  Yet even when he spoke again, there was still a certain unsteadiness in his voice.  “How did you come across Mr. Garratt Skinner?” he asked.

“Barstow introduced me.  I made Barstow’s acquaintance at the Criterion Bar, and he took me to Garratt Skinner’s house in Hobart Place.”

“I see,” said Mr. Jarvice.  “It was in Garratt Skinner’s house that you lost your money, I suppose.”

“Yes, but he had no hand in it,” exclaimed Walter Hine.  “He does not know how much I lost.  He would be angry if he did.”

A faint smile flickered across Jarvice’s face.