"I lost two hundred to-night; I must pay it, or be disgraced forever; I have not a farthing; I cannot get the money for my life; no Jews will lend to me, I am under age; and--and"-- his voice sank lower and grew more defiant, for he knew that the sole thing forbidden him peremptorily by both his father and his brothers was the thing he had now to tell--"and--I borrowed three ponies of Granville Lee yesterday, as he came from the Corner with a lot of banknotes after settling-day.

I told him I would pay them to-morrow; I made sure I should have won to-night." The piteous unreason of the born gamester, who clings so madly to the belief that luck must come to him, and sets on that belief as though a bank were his to lose his gold from, was never more utterly spoken in all its folly, in all its pitiable optimism, than now in the boy's confession.
Bertie started from his chair, his sleepy languor dissipated; on his face the look that had come there when Lord Royallieu had dishonored his mother's name.

In his code there was one shameless piece of utter and unmentionable degradation--it was to borrow of a friend.
"You will bring some disgrace on us before you die, Berkeley," he said, with a keener inflection of pain and contempt than had ever been in his voice.

"Have you no common knowledge of honor ?" The lad flushed under the lash of the words, but it was a flush of anger rather than of shame; he did not lift his eyes, but gazed sullenly down on the yellow paper of a Paris romance he was irritably dog-earing.
"You are severe enough," he said gloomily, and yet insolently.

"Are you such a mirror of honor yourself?
I suppose my debts, at the worst, are about one-fifth of yours." For a moment even the sweetness of Cecil's temper almost gave way.