I can suggest nothing except to take the morning mail to the Shires, and ask Royal straight out; he never refuses you." Berkeley looked at him with a bewildered terror that banished at a stroke his sullen defiance; he was irresolute as a girl, and keenly moved by fear.
"I would rather cut my throat," he said, with a wild exaggeration that was but the literal reflection of the trepidation on him; "as I live I would! I have had so much from him lately--you don't know how much--and now of all times, when they threaten to foreclose the mortgage on Royallieu--" "What?
Foreclose what ?" "The mortgage!" answered Berkeley impatiently; to his childish egotism it seemed cruel and intolerable that any extremities should be considered save his own.

"You know the lands are mortgaged as deeply as Monti and the entail would allow them.

They threatened to foreclose--I think that's the word--and Royal has had God knows what work to stave them off.

I no more dare face him, and ask him for a sovereign now than I dare ask him to give me the gold plate off the sideboard." Cecil listened gravely; it cut him more keenly than he showed to learn the evils and the ruin that so closely menaced his house; and to find how entirely his father's morbid mania against him severed him from all the interests and all the confidence of his family, and left him ignorant of matters even so nearly touching him as these.
"Your intelligence is not cheerful, little one," he said, with a languid stretch of his limbs; it was his nature to glide off painful subjects.
"And--I really am sleepy! You think there is no hope Royal would help you ?" "I tell you I will shoot myself through the brain rather than ask him." Bertie moved restlessly in the soft depths of his lounging-chair; he shunned worry, loathed it, escaped it at every portal, and here it came to him just when he wanted to go to sleep.

He could not divest himself of the feeling that, had his own career been different,--less extravagant, less dissipated, less indolently spendthrift,--he might have exercised a better influence, and his brother's young life might have been more prudently launched upon the world.