“The mater is right, dad,” said he.  “It is bad enough, Heaven knows, but we must not take too dark a view of it.  After all, this insolent letter is in itself evidence that I had nothing to do with the schemes of the base villain who wrote it.”

“They may think it prearranged.”

“They could not.  My whole life cries out against the thought.  They could not look me in the face and entertain it.”

“No, boy, not if they have eyes in their heads,” cried the Admiral, plucking up courage at the sight of the flashing eyes and brave, defiant face.  “We have the letter, and we have your character.  We’ll weather it yet between them.  It’s my fault from the beginning for choosing such a land-shark for your consort.  God help me, I thought I was finding such an opening for you.”

“Dear dad!  How could you possibly know?  As he says in his letter, it has given me a lesson.  But he was so much older and so much more experienced, that it was hard for me to ask to examine his books.  But we must waste no time.  I must go to the City.”

“What will you do?”

“What an honest man should do.  I will write to all our clients and creditors, assemble them, lay the whole matter before them, read them the letter and put myself absolutely in their hands.”

“That’s it, boy—­yard-arm to yard-arm, and have it over.”

“I must go at once.”  He put on his top-coat and his hat.  “But I have ten minutes yet before I can catch a train.  There is one little thing which I must do before I start.”

He had caught sight through the long glass folding door of the gleam of a white blouse and a straw hat in the tennis ground.  Clara used often to meet him there of a morning to say a few words before he hurried away into the City.  He walked out now with the quick, firm step of a man who has taken a momentous resolution, but his face was haggard and his lips pale.

“Clara,” said he, as she came towards him with words of greeting, “I am sorry to bring ill news to you, but things have gone wrong in the City, and—­and I think that I ought to release you from your engagement.”

Clara stared at him with her great questioning dark eyes, and her face became as pale as his.

“How can the City affect you and me, Harold?”

“It is dishonor.  I cannot ask you to share it.”

“Dishonor!  The loss of some miserable gold and silver coins!”

“Oh, Clara, if it were only that!  We could be far happier together in a little cottage in the country than with all the riches of the City.  Poverty could not cut me to the heart, as I have been cut this morning.  Why, it is but twenty minutes since I had the letter, Clara, and it seems to me to be some old, old thing which happened far away in my past life, some horrid black cloud which shut out all the freshness and the peace from it.”

“But what is it, then?  What do you fear worse than poverty?”