’And I’d like to know, Sir, who the deuce, or, rather, what the ——­(plague we’ll say) could put into your head, Sir, to suppose any such matter?’

But this was only one of Sturk’s explosions, and he and little Toole parted no better and no worse friends than usual, in ten minutes more at the latter’s door-step.

So Toole said to Mrs. T. that evening——­

’Sturk owes money, mark my words, sweetheart.  Remember I say it—­he’ll cool his heels in a prison, if he’s no wiser than of late, before a twel’month.  Since the beginning of February he has lost—­just wait a minute, and let me see—­ay, that, L150 by the levanting of old Tom Farthingale; and, I had it to-day from little O’Leary, who had it from Jim Kelly, old Craddock’s conducting clerk, he’s bit to the tune of three hundred more by the failure of Larkin, Brothers, and Hoolaghan.  You see a little bit of usury under the rose is all very well for a vulgar dog like Sturk, if he knows the town, and how to go about it; but hang, it, he knows nothing.  Why, the turnpike-man, over the way, would not have taken old Jos.  Farthingale’s bill for fippence—­no, nor his bond neither; and he’s stupid beside—­but he can’t help that, the hound!—­and he’ll owe a whole year’s rent only six weeks hence, and he has not a shilling to bless himself with.  Unfortunate devil—­I’ve no reason to like him—­but, truly, I do pity him.’

Saying which Tom Toole, with his back to the fire, and a look of concern thrown into his comic little mug, and his eyebrows raised, experienced a very pleasurable glow of commiseration.

Sturk, on the contrary, was more than commonly silent and savage that evening, and sat in his drawing-room, with his fists in his breeches’ pockets, and his heels stretched out, lurid and threatening, in a gloomy and highly electric state.  Mrs. S. did not venture her usual ’would my Barney like a dish of tea?’ but plied her worsted and knitting-needles with mild concentration, sometimes peeping under her lashes at Sturk, and sometimes telegraphing faintly to the children if they whispered too loud—­all cautious pantomime—­nutu signisque loquuntur.

Sturk was incensed by the suspicion that Tom Toole knew something of his losses, ‘the dirty, little, unscrupulous spy and tattler.’  He was confident, however, that he could not know their extent.  It was certainly a hard thing, and enough to exasperate a better man than Sturk, that the savings of a shrewd, and, in many ways, a self-denying life should have been swept away, and something along with them, by a few unlucky casts in little more than twelve months.  And he such a clever dog, too! the best player, all to nothing, driven to the wall, by a cursed obstinate run of infernal luck.  And he used to scowl, and grind his teeth, and nearly break the keys and shillings in his gripe in his breeches’ pocket, as imprecations, hot and unspoken, coursed one another through his brain.  Then up he would get, and walk sulkily