I thought I could use the money for a week or so, then put it back, and have a nice little scoop, at no one's cost.

I thought it was a dead-sure thing--and I was hard up, and Kathleen wouldn't lend me any more.

If Kathleen had only done the decent thing--" A sudden flush of anger swept over Charley's face--never before in his life had that face been so sensitive, never even as a child.

Something had waked in the odd soul of Beauty Steele.
"Don't be a sweep--leave Kathleen out of it!" he said, in a sharp, querulous voice--a voice unnatural to himself, suggestive of little use, as though he were learning to speak, using strange words stumblingly through a melee of the emotions.

It was not the voice of Charley Steele the fop, the poseur, the idlest man in the world.
"What part of the twenty-five thousand went into the arsenic ?" he said, after a pause.