ce in
his favour; because that day when I read in the betting-book what he had
staked against the favourite, I laid all the cash and credit I could
get with his outsiders and against the favourite, and I won five hundred
pounds. What he won--to my youthful eyes-was fabulous. There's no use
saying what you think--you kind friends, who've always done something
in life--that I was a good-for-nothing creature to give myself up to
the turf, to horses and jockeys, and the janissaries of sport. You must
remember that for generations my family had run on a very narrow margin
of succession, there seldom, if ever, being more than two born in
any generation of the family, so that there was always enough for the
younger son or daughter; and to take up a profession was not necessary
for livelihood. If my mother, who was an intellectual and able woman,
had lived, it's hard to tell what I should have become; for steered
aright, given true ideas of what life should mean to a man, I might have
become ambitious and forged ahead in one direction or another. But there
it was, she died when I was ten, and there was no one to mould me. At
Eton, at Oxford-well, they are not preparatory schools to the business
of life. And when at twenty-four I inherited the fortune my mother left
me, I had only one idea: to live the life of a sporting gentleman. I had
a name as a cricketer--"

"Ah--I remember, Crozier of Lammis!" interjected the Young Doctor
involuntarily. "I'm a north of Ireland man, but I remember--"

"Yes, Lammis," the sick man went on. "Castlegarry was my father's place,
but my mother left me Lammis. When I got control of it, and of the
securities she left, I felt my oats, as they say; and I wasn't long in
making a show of courage, not to say rashness, in following my leader.
He gave me luck for a time, indeed so great that I could even breed
horses of my own. But the luck went against him at last, and then, of
course, against me; and I began to feel that suction which, as it draws
the cash out of your pocket, the credit out of your bank, seems to draw
also the whole internal economy out of your body--a ghastly, empty,
collapsing thing."

Mrs. Tynan gave a great sigh. She had once put two hundred dollars in
a mine--on paper--and it ended in a lawsuit; and on the verdict in the
lawsuit depended the two hundred dollars and more. When she read a
fatal telegram to her saying that all was lost, she had had that empty,
collapsing feeling.