It was what he had expected.  He would, perhaps, have stood a better chance if he had read him Peter’s encouraging letter of the director’s opinion of his Cumberland property, and he might also have brought him up standing (and gone away with the check in his pocket) if he had told him that the money was to save his own wife’s daughter and grandchild from disgrace—­but that secret was not his.  Only as a last, desperate resource would he lay that fact bare to a man like Arthur Breen, and perhaps not even then.  John Breen’s word was, or ought to be, sacred enough on which to borrow ten thousand dollars or any other sum.  That meant a mortgage on his life until every cent was paid.

Do not smile, dear reader.  He is only learning his first lesson in modern finance.  All young men “raised” as Jack had been—­and the Scribe is one of them—­would have been of the same mind at his age.  In a great city, when your tea-kettle starts to leaking, you never borrow a whole one from your neighbor; you send to the shop at the corner and buy another.  In the country—­Jack’s country, I mean—­miles from a store, you borrow your neighbor’s, who promptly borrows your saucepan in return.  And it was so in larger matters:  the old Chippendale desk with its secret drawer was often the bank—­the only one, perhaps, in a week’s journey.  It is astonishing in these days to think how many dingy, tattered or torn bank-notes were fished out of these same receptacles and handed over to a neighbor with the customary—­“With the greatest pleasure, my dear sir.  When you can sell your corn or hogs, or that mortgage is paid off, you can return it.”  A man who was able to lend, and who still refused to lend, to a friend in his adversity, was a pariah.  He had committed the unpardonable sin.  And the last drop of the best Madeira went the same way and with equal graciousness!

Peter, at Jack’s knock, opened the door himself.  Isaac Cohen had just come in to show him a new book, and Peter supposed some one from the shop below had sent upstairs for him.

“Oh! it’s you, my boy!” Peter cried in his hearty way, his arms around Jack’s shoulders as he drew him inside the room.  Then something in the boy’s face checked him, bringing to mind the tragedy.  “Yes, I read it all in the papers,” he exclaimed in a sympathetic voice.  “Terrible, isn’t it!  Poor Minott.  How are his wife and the poor little baby—­and dear Ruth.  The funeral is to-morrow I see by the papers.  Yes, of course I’m going.”  As he spoke he turned his head and scanned Jack closely.

“Are you ill, my boy?” he asked in an anxious tone, leading him to a seat on the sofa.  “You look terribly worn.”

“We all have our troubles, Uncle Peter,” Jack replied with a glance at Cohen, who had risen from his chair to shake his hand.

“Yes—­but not you.  Out with it!  Isaac doesn’t count.  Anything you can tell me you can tell him.  What’s the matter?—­is it Ruth?”