“So I knew! Of course, you may say he was pretty well-breeched, but—”

“I shan’t say anything of the sort. I should have done no more for him whatever his circumstances might have been. By the time he went to Harrow I wasn’t such a cawker as I was when Laurie was a boy.” He paused, slightly frowning, and then said abruptly: “You know, George, when my father died, I was too young for my inheritance!”

“Well, I own we all thought so—made sure you’d play ducks and drakes with it!—but you never did so, and—”

“No, I did worse: I ruined Laurie.”

“Oh, come now, Waldo—” George protested, adding after a moment’s reflection: “Encouraged him to depend on you, you mean. I suppose you did—and I’m damned if I know why, for you never liked him above half, did you?”

“I didn’t. But when I was—what did he call it?—swimming in riches,and my uncle was possessed of no more than an independence—besides being as big a screw as our cousin Joseph, and keeping Laurie devilish short—ft seemed so hard-fisted not to come to Laurie’s rescue!”

“Yes, I see,” said George slowly. “And having once begun to frank him you couldn’t stop.”

“I might have done so, but I didn’t. What, after all, did it signify to me? By the time I’d acquired enough sense to know what it signified to him,the mischief had been done.”

“Oh!” George turned this over in his mind. “Ay, very likely! But if you think the fault is yours, all I can say is that it ain’t like you to leave him to sink or swim now! What’s more, I don’t believe you would!”

“No, I was afraid he wouldn’t believe it either,” admitted Sir Waldo. “He seems to have done so, however, which makes me hopeful that the mischief has not gone beyond repair.”

George uttered a bark of sceptical laugher. “He’ll be gapped in some hell before the week’s out—and don’t tell me you’ve tied him up, because he ain’t such a bottlehead that he don’t know you’d never compel him to pay the forfeit!”