d quietly.

He got up suddenly, went to the door, locked it, put the key in his
pocket, and, coming back, sat down again beside the table.

Billy watched him with shrewd, hunted eyes. What did Charley mean to
do? To give him in charge? To send him to jail? To shut him out from the
world where he had enjoyed himself so much for years and years? Never to
go forth free among his fellows! Never to play the gallant with all the
pretty girls he knew! Never to have any sports, or games, or tobacco,
or good meals, or canoeing in summer, or tobogganing in winter, or
moose-hunting, or any sort of philandering!

The thoughts that filled his mind now were not those of regret for his
crime, but the fears of the materialist and sentimentalist, who revolted
at punishment and all the shame and deprivation it would involve.

"What did you do with the money?" said Charley, after a minute's
silence, in which two minds had travelled far.

"I put it into mines."

"What mines?"

"Out on Lake Superior."

"What sort of mines?"

"Arsenic."

Charley's eye-glass dropped, and rattled against the gold button of his
white waistcoat.

"In arsenic-mines!" He put the monocle to his eye again. "On whose
advice?"

"John Brown's."

"John Brown's!" Charley Steele's ideas were suddenly shaken and
scattered by a man's name, as a bolting horse will crumple into
confusion a crowd of people. So this was the way his John Brown had come
home to roost. He lifted the empty whiskey-glass to his lips and drained
air. He was terribly thirsty; he needed something to pull himself
together. Five years of dissipation had not robbed him of his splendid
native ability, but it had, as it were, broken the continuity of his
will and the sequence of his intellect.

"It was not investment?" he asked, his tongue thick and hot in his
mouth.

"No. What would have been the good?"

"Of course. Speculation--you bought heavily to sell on an expected
rise?"

"Yes."

There was something so even in Charley's manner and tone that Billy
misinterpreted it. It seemed hopeful that Charley was going to make the
best of a bad job.

"You see," Billy said eagerly, "it seemed dead certain. He showed me the
way the thing was being done, the way the company was being floated, how
the market in New York was catching hold. It looked splendid. I thought
I could use the money for a week or so, then put it back, and have
a nice little scoop, at no one's cost. I thought it was a