"No!"

The strange seeker of loans at length rose to depart. He reached the
door. Suddenly he turned back, his eyes blazing with the sombre radiance
of despair. He strode up to the table, and planted himself, with folded
arms, immediately in front of the usurer.

"Mark me!" said West, in a tone of deep suppressed passion, like the
hollow murmur of the sea before a storm: "It is a question of life or
death with me to get money before sunset. Lend me only twenty pounds,
and within twelve months I will repay you one hundred. I will give you
every power which the law can give one man over another; and I will
pledge my honor, which never yet was questioned, to the bargain!"

The usurer almost smiled, so strangely sarcastic was the contraction of
his features, as he listened to these words.

"I do not question your honor," he said, icily, "but honor has nothing
to do with business. As for the law, there is an old axiom which says,
Out of nothing, nothing comes."

Bernard West regarded the cold rocky face and the passionless mouth from
which these words proceeded with that stinging wrath a man feels who has
humiliated himself in vain. Nevertheless he clung to the old flinty
usurer as to the last rock in a deluge, and a sense of savage
recklessness came over him when he advanced yet closer to the living
cash-box before him, while the latter shrank half-terrified before the
burning gaze of his visitor's dilated pupils.

Laying his hand upon the money-lender's shoulder, by a gesture of
terrible familiarity that insisted upon and commanded attention to his
words, West spoke with a sudden clearness and even musical distinctness
of utterance that made his words yet more appalling in their solemn
despair--"Old man, I am desperate; I am ruined. It is but a few months
since my father died, leaving me not only penniless, but encircled by
petty obligations which have cramped every movement I would have made. I
have had no time, no quiet, to make an effort such as my position
requires. This day I have spent my last shilling. I am too proud to beg,
and to borrow is to beg when a man is known to be in _real_ distress.
Within one hour from this time I shall be beyond all the tortures of a
life which for my own sake I care little to preserve. And yet I have
spent my youth in accumulating treasures, which but a brief space might
have rendered productive of benefit to man, and of profit to myself. My
father's little means and my own ha