I confess, I need a month's work to recover my self-respect." These lines brought Rowland no small perturbation; the more, that what they seemed to point to surprised him.

During the nine months of their companionship Roderick had shown so little taste for dissipation that Rowland had come to think of it as a canceled danger, and it greatly perplexed him to learn that his friend had apparently proved so pliant to opportunity.

But Roderick's allusions were ambiguous, and it was possible they might simply mean that he was out of patience with a frivolous way of life and fretting wholesomely over his absent work.
It was a very good thing, certainly, that idleness should prove, on experiment, to sit heavily on his conscience.

Nevertheless, the letter needed, to Rowland's mind, a key: the key arrived a week later.

"In common charity," Roderick wrote, "lend me a hundred pounds! I have gambled away my last franc--I have made a mountain of debts.