“You must know I could not do what you asked; I could not meet any man in the Guards face to face if I sunk myself and sunk them so low.  Can’t you see that, little one?”

There was a wistfulness in the last words; he would gladly have believed that his brother had at length some perception of his meaning.

“You say so, and that is enough,” said the boy pettishly; “I cannot understand that I asked anything so dreadful; but I suppose you have too many needs of your own to have any resources left for mine.”

Cecil shrugged his shoulders slightly again, and let him go.  But he could not altogether banish a pang of pain at his heart, less even for his brother’s ingratitude than at his callousness to all those finer, better instincts of which honor is the concrete name.

For the moment, thought—­grave, weary, and darkened—­fell on him; he had passed through what he would have suffered any amount of misconstruction to escape—­a disagreeable scene; he had been as unable as though he were a Commissionaire in the streets to advance a step to succor the necessities for which his help had been asked; and he was forced, despite all his will, to look for the first time blankly in the face the ruin that awaited him.  There was no other name for it:  it would be ruin complete and wholly inevitable.  His signature would have been accepted no more by any bill-discounter in London; he had forestalled all, to the uttermost farthing; his debts pressed heavier every day; he could have no power to avert the crash that must in a few weeks, or at most a few months, fall upon him.  And to him an utter blankness and darkness lay beyond.

Barred out from the only life he knew, the only life that seemed to him endurable or worth the living; severed from all the pleasures, pursuits, habits, and luxuries of long custom; deprived of all that had become to him as second nature from childhood; sold up, penniless, driven out from all that he had known as the very necessities of existence; his very name forgotten in the world of which he was now the darling; a man without a career, without a hope, without a refuge—­he could not realize that this was what awaited him then; this was the fate that must within so short a space be his.  Life had gone so smoothly with him, and his world was a world from whose surface every distasteful thought was so habitually excluded, that he could no more understand this desolation lying in wait for him than one in the fullness and elasticity of health can believe the doom that tells him he will be a dead man before the sun has set.