it? You'll excuse
me, Jack--but you always were a fool when your damned idiotic notions
of what is right and wrong got into your head--and you'll never get over
it. You might have had an interest in my business by this time, and be
able to write your check in four figures; and yet here you are cooped up
in a Jersey village, living at a roadside tavern, and getting a thousand
dollars a year. That's what your father did before you; went round
paying everybody's debts; never could teach him anything; died poor,
just as I told him he would."

Jack had to hold on to his chair to keep his mouth closed. His father's
memory was dangerous ground for any man to tread on--even his father's
brother; but the stake for which he was playing was too great to be
risked by his own anger.

"No, Jack," Breen continued, gathering up a mass of letters and jamming
them into a pigeon-hole in front of him, as if the whole matter was set
forth in their pages and he was through with it forever. "No--I guess
I'll pass on that ten thousand-dollar loan. I am sorry, but A. B. &
Co, haven't any shekels for that kind of tommy-rot. As to your helping
Minott, what I've got to say to you is just this: let the other fellow
walk--the fellow Garry owes money to--but don't you butt in. They'll
only laugh at you. Now you will have to excuse me--the market's kiting,
and I've got to watch it. Give my love to Ruth. Your aunt and I will be
out on the noon train for the funeral. Good-by."

It was what he had expected. He would, perhaps, have stood a better
chance if he had read him Peter's encouraging letter of the director's
opinion of his Cumberland property, and he might also have brought him
up standing (and gone away with the check in his pocket) if he had told
him that the money was to save his own wife's daughter and grandchild
from disgrace--but that secret was not his. Only as a last, desperate
resource would he lay that fact bare to a man like Arthur Breen, and
perhaps not even then. John Breen's word was, or ought to be, sacred
enough on which to borrow ten thousand dollars or any other sum. That
meant a mortgage on his life until every cent was paid.

Do not smile, dear reader. He is only learning his first lesson in
modern finance. All young men "raised" as Jack had been--and the Scribe
is one of them--would have been of the same mind at his age. In a great
city, when your tea-kettle starts to leaking, you never borrow a whole
one from your neighbo