In his boyish incoherence and its disjointed inelegance the appeal was panted out rather than spoken; and while his head drooped and the hot color burned in his face, he darted a swift look at his brother, so full of dread and misery that it pierced Cecil to the quick as he rose from his chair and paced the room, flinging his cheroot aside; the look disarmed the reply that was on his lips, but his face grew dark.

“What you ask is impossible,” he said briefly.  “If I did such a thing as that, I should deserve to be hounded out of the Guards to-morrow.”

The boy’s face grew more sullen, more haggard, more evil, as he still bent his eyes on the table, his glance not meeting his brother’s.

“You speak as if it would be a crime,” he muttered savagely, with a plaintive moan of pain in the tone; he thought himself cruelly dealt with and unjustly punished.

“It would be the trick of a swindler, and it would be the shame of a gentleman,” said Cecil, as briefly still.  “That is answer enough.”

“Then you will not do it?”

“I have replied already.”

There was that in the tone, and in the look with which he paused before the table, that Berkeley had never heard or seen in him before; something that made the supple, childish, petulant, cowardly nature of the boy shrink and be silenced; something for a single instant of the haughty and untamable temper of the Royallieu blood that awoke in the too feminine softness and sweetness of Cecil’s disposition.

“You said that you would aid me at any cost, and now that I ask you so wretched a trifle, you treat me as if I were a scoundrel,” he moaned passionately.  “The Seraph would give you the money at a word.  It is your pride—­nothing but pride.  Much pride is worth to us who are penniless beggars!”

“If we are penniless beggars, by what right should we borrow of other men?”

“You are wonderfully scrupulous, all of a sudden!”

Cecil shrugged his shoulders slightly and began to smoke again.  He did not attempt to push the argument.  His character was too indolent to defend itself against aspersion, and horror of a quarrelsome scene far greater than his heed of misconstruction.

“You are a brute to me!” went on the lad, with his querulous and bitter passion rising almost to tears like a woman’s.  “You pretend you can refuse me nothing; and the moment I ask you the smallest thing you turn on me, and speak as if I were the greatest blackguard on earth.  You’ll let me go to the bad to-morrow rather than bend your pride to save me; you live like a Duke, and don’t care if I should die in a debtor’s prison!  You only brag about ‘honor’ when you want to get out of helping a fellow; and if I were to cut my throat to-night you would only shrug your shoulders, and sneer at my death in the clubroom, with a jest picked out of your cursed French novels!”

“Melodramatic, and scarcely correct,” murmured Bertie.