s a model
for anything, unless it were to stand in a tailor's window in Bond
Street to show the muffs how to dress. That isn't the point, though; you
say you want near 300 pounds by to-morrow--to-day rather. I can suggest
nothing except to take the morning mail to the Shires, and ask Royal
straight out; he never refuses you."

Berkeley looked at him with a bewildered terror that banished at a
stroke his sullen defiance; he was irresolute as a girl, and keenly
moved by fear.

"I would rather cut my throat," he said, with a wild exaggeration that
was but the literal reflection of the trepidation on him; "as I live I
would! I have had so much from him lately--you don't know how much--and
now of all times, when they threaten to foreclose the mortgage on
Royallieu--"

"What? Foreclose what?"

"The mortgage!" answered Berkeley impatiently; to his childish
egotism it seemed cruel and intolerable that any extremities should be
considered save his own. "You know the lands are mortgaged as deeply as
Monti and the entail would allow them. They threatened to foreclose--I
think that's the word--and Royal has had God knows what work to stave
them off. I no more dare face him, and ask him for a sovereign now than
I dare ask him to give me the gold plate off the sideboard."

Cecil listened gravely; it cut him more keenly than he showed to learn
the evils and the ruin that so closely menaced his house; and to find
how entirely his father's morbid mania against him severed him from
all the interests and all the confidence of his family, and left him
ignorant of matters even so nearly touching him as these.

"Your intelligence is not cheerful, little one," he said, with a languid
stretch of his limbs; it was his nature to glide off painful subjects.
"And--I really am sleepy! You think there is no hope Royal would help
you?"

"I tell you I will shoot myself through the brain rather than ask him."

Bertie moved restlessly in the soft depths of his lounging-chair; he
shunned worry, loathed it, escaped it at every portal, and here it came
to him just when he wanted to go to sleep. He could not divest
himself of the feeling that, had his own career been different,--less
extravagant, less dissipated, less indolently spendthrift,--he might
have exercised a better influence, and his brother's young life might
have been more prudently launched upon the world. He felt, too, with a
sharper pang than he had ever felt it for himself, the bri