“Dear boy, why didn’t you sleep upon it?  I never think of disagreeable things till they wake me with my coffee; then I take them up with the cup and put them down with it.  You don’t know how well it answers; it disposes of them wonderfully.”

The boy lifted his head with a quick, reproachful anger, and in the gaslight his cheeks were flushed, his eyes full of tears.

“How brutal you are, Bertie!  I tell you I am ruined, and you care no more than if you were a stone.  You only think of yourself; you only live for yourself!”

He had forgotten the money that had been tossed to him off that very table the day before the Grand Military; he had forgotten the debts that had been paid for him out of the winnings of that very race.  There is a childish, wayward, wailing temper, which never counts benefits received save as title-deeds by which to demand others.  Cecil looked at him with just a shadow of regret, not reproachful enough to be rebuke, in his glance, but did not defend himself in any way against the boyish, passionate accusation, nor recall his own past gifts into remembrance.

“‘Brutal’!  What a word, little one.  Nobody’s brutal now; you never see that form nowadays.  Come, what is the worst this time?”

Berkeley looked sullenly down on the table where his elbows leaned; scattering the rose-notes, the French novels, the cigarettes, and the gold essence-bottles with which it was strewn; there was something dogged yet agitated, half-insolent yet half-timidly irresolute, upon him, that was new there.

“The worst is soon told,” he said huskily, and his teeth chattered together slightly, as though with cold, as he spoke.  “I lost two hundred to-night; I must pay it, or be disgraced forever; I have not a farthing; I cannot get the money for my life; no Jews will lend to me, I am under age; and—­and”—­his voice sank lower and grew more defiant, for he knew that the sole thing forbidden him peremptorily by both his father and his brothers was the thing he had now to tell—­“and—­I borrowed three ponies of Granville Lee yesterday, as he came from the Corner with a lot of banknotes after settling-day.  I told him I would pay them to-morrow; I made sure I should have won to-night.”

The piteous unreason of the born gamester, who clings so madly to the belief that luck must come to him, and sets on that belief as though a bank were his to lose his gold from, was never more utterly spoken in all its folly, in all its pitiable optimism, than now in the boy’s confession.

Bertie started from his chair, his sleepy languor dissipated; on his face the look that had come there when Lord Royallieu had dishonored his mother’s name.  In his code there was one shameless piece of utter and unmentionable degradation—­it was to borrow of a friend.

“You will bring some disgrace on us before you die, Berkeley,” he said, with a keener inflection of pain and contempt than had ever been in his voice.  “Have you no common knowledge of honor?”