ance the appeal was
panted out rather than spoken; and while his head drooped and the hot
color burned in his face, he darted a swift look at his brother, so full
of dread and misery that it pierced Cecil to the quick as he rose from
his chair and paced the room, flinging his cheroot aside; the look
disarmed the reply that was on his lips, but his face grew dark.

"What you ask is impossible," he said briefly. "If I did such a thing as
that, I should deserve to be hounded out of the Guards to-morrow."

The boy's face grew more sullen, more haggard, more evil, as he still
bent his eyes on the table, his glance not meeting his brother's.

"You speak as if it would be a crime," he muttered savagely, with a
plaintive moan of pain in the tone; he thought himself cruelly dealt
with and unjustly punished.

"It would be the trick of a swindler, and it would be the shame of a
gentleman," said Cecil, as briefly still. "That is answer enough."

"Then you will not do it?"

"I have replied already."

There was that in the tone, and in the look with which he paused
before the table, that Berkeley had never heard or seen in him before;
something that made the supple, childish, petulant, cowardly nature of
the boy shrink and be silenced; something for a single instant of the
haughty and untamable temper of the Royallieu blood that awoke in the
too feminine softness and sweetness of Cecil's disposition.

"You said that you would aid me at any cost, and now that I ask you so
wretched a trifle, you treat me as if I were a scoundrel," he moaned
passionately. "The Seraph would give you the money at a word. It is your
pride--nothing but pride. Much pride is worth to us who are penniless
beggars!"

"If we are penniless beggars, by what right should we borrow of other
men?"

"You are wonderfully scrupulous, all of a sudden!"

Cecil shrugged his shoulders slightly and began to smoke again. He did
not attempt to push the argument. His character was too indolent to
defend itself against aspersion, and horror of a quarrelsome scene far
greater than his heed of misconstruction.

"You are a brute to me!" went on the lad, with his querulous and bitter
passion rising almost to tears like a woman's. "You pretend you can
refuse me nothing; and the moment I ask you the smallest thing you turn
on me, and speak as if I were the greatest blackguard on earth. You'll
let me go to the bad to-morrow rather than bend your pride to save
me; you liv