“I tell you I will shoot myself through the brain rather than ask him.”

Bertie moved restlessly in the soft depths of his lounging-chair; he shunned worry, loathed it, escaped it at every portal, and here it came to him just when he wanted to go to sleep.  He could not divest himself of the feeling that, had his own career been different,—­less extravagant, less dissipated, less indolently spendthrift,—­he might have exercised a better influence, and his brother’s young life might have been more prudently launched upon the world.  He felt, too, with a sharper pang than he had ever felt it for himself, the brilliant beggary in which he lived, the utter inability he had to raise even the sum that the boy now needed; a sum so trifling, in his set, and with his habits, that he had betted it over and over again in a clubroom, on a single game of whist.  It cut him with a bitter, impatient pain; he was as generous as the winds, and there is no trial keener to such a temper than the poverty that paralyzes its power to give.

“It is no use to give you false hopes, young one,” he said gently.  “I can do nothing!  You ought to know me by this time; and if you do, you know too that if the money was mine it would be yours at a word—­if you don’t, no matter!  Frankly, Berk, I am all down-hill; my bills may be called in any moment; when they are I must send in my papers to sell, and cut the country, if my duns don’t catch me before, which they probably will; in which event I shall be to all intents and purposes—­dead.  This is not lively conversation, but you will do me the justice to say that it was not I who introduced it.  Only—­one word for all, my boy; understand this:  if I could help you I would, cost what it might, but as matters stand—­I cannot.”

And with that Cecil puffed a great cloud of smoke to envelope him; the subject was painful, the denial wounded him by whom it had to be given full as much as it could wound him whom it refused.  Berkeley heard it in silence; his head still hung down, his color changing, his hands nervously playing with the bouquet-bottles, shutting and opening their gold tops.

“No—­yes—­I know,” he said hurriedly; “I have no right to expect it, and have been behaving like a cur, and—­and—­all that, I know.  But—­there is one way you could save me, Bertie, if it isn’t too much for a fellow to ask.”

“I can’t say I see the way, little one,” said Cecil, with a sigh.  “What is it?”

“Why—­look here.  You see I’m not of age; my signature is of no use; they won’t take it; else I could get money in no time on what must come to me when Royal dies; though ’tisn’t enough to make the Jews ‘melt’ at a risk.  Now—­now—­look here.  I can’t see that there could be any harm in it.  You are such chums with Lord Rockingham, and he’s as rich as all the Jews put together.  What could there be in it if you just asked him to lend you a monkey for me?  He’d do it in a minute, because he’d give his head away to you—­they all say so—­and he’ll never miss it.  Now, Bertie—­will you?”