with Madeira, cakes, and
sandwiches, and Stephen began on them immediately.

"I came over so you could see me in my uniform," he explained; "and
I'm going back right away to see mother and Paige and Marye and
Camilla." He paused, sandwich suspended, then swallowed what he
had been chewing and took another bite, recklessly.

"I'm very fond of Camilla," he said condescendingly. "She's very
nice about my going--the only one who hasn't snivelled. I tell
you, Ailsa, Camilla is a good deal of a girl. . . . And I've
promised to look out for her uncle--keep an eye on old Lent, you
know, which seems to comfort her a good deal when she begins
crying----

"Oh. . . I thought Camilla didn't cry."

"She cries a little--now and then."

"About her uncle?"

"Certainly."

Ailsa looked down at her ringless fingers. Within the week she had
laid away both rings, meaning to resume them some day.

"If you and your father go, your office will be closed, I suppose."

"Oh, no. Farren will run it."

"I see. . . . And Mr. Berkley, too, I suppose."

Stephen looked up from his bitten seedcake.

"Berkley? He left long ago."

"Left--where?" she asked, confused.

"Left the office. It couldn't be helped. There was nothing for
him to do. I was sorry--I'm sorrier now----"

He checked himself, hesitated, turned his troubled eyes on Ailsa.

"I _did_ like him so much."

"Don't you like him--still?"

"Yes--_I_ do. I don't know what was the matter with that man. He
went all to pieces."

"W-what!"

"Utterly. Isn't it too bad."

She sat there very silent, very white. Stephen bit into another
cake, angrily.

"It's the company he keeps," he said--"a lot of fast men--fast
enough to be talked about, fashionable enough to be tolerated--Jack
Casson is one of them, and that little ass, Arthur Wye. _That's_
the crowd--a horse-racing, hard-drinking, hard-gambling crew."

"But--he is--Mr. Berkley's circumstances--how can he do such
things----"

"Some idiot--even Berkley doesn't know who--took all those dead
stocks off his hands. Wasn't it the devil's own luck for Berkley
to find a market in times like these?"

"But it ended him. . . . Oh, I was fond of him, I tell you, Ailsa!
I hate like thunder to see him this way----"

"_What_ way!"

"Oh, not caring for anybody or anything. He's never sober. I
don't mean that I ever saw him otherwise--he doesn't get drunk like
an ordinary man: he just turns deathly white and p