“You are a brute to me!” went on the lad, with his querulous and bitter passion rising almost to tears like a woman's. “You pretend you can refuse me nothing; and the moment I ask you the smallest thing you turn on me, and speak as if I were the greatest blackguard on earth. You'll let me go to the bad to-morrow rather than bend your pride to save me; you live like a Duke, and don't care if I should die in a debtor's prison! You only brag about 'honor' when you want to get out of helping a fellow; and if I were to cut my throat to-night you would only shrug your shoulders, and sneer at my death in the clubroom, with a jest picked out of your cursed French novels!” “Melodramatic, and scarcely correct,” murmured Bertie. The ingratitude to himself touched him indeed but little; he was not given to making much of anything that was due to himself--partly through carelessness, partly through generosity; but the absence in his brother of that delicate, intangible, indescribable sensitive-nerve which men call Honor, an absence that had never struck on him so vividly as it did to-night, troubled him, surprised him, oppressed him. There is no science that can supply this defect to the temperament created without it; it may be taught a counterfeit, but it will never own a reality. “Little one, you are heated, and don't know what you say,” he began very gently, a few moments later, as he leaned forward and looked straight in the boy's eyes. “Don't be down about this; you will pull through, never fear. Listen to me; go down to Royal, and tell him all frankly. I know him better than you; he will be savage for a second, but he would sell every stick and stone on the land for your sake; he will see you safe through this. Only bear one thing in mind--tell him all. No half measures, no half confidences; tell him the worst, and ask his help. You will not come back without it.” Berkeley listened; his eyes shunning his brother's, the red color darker on his face. “Do as I say,” said Cecil, very gently still. “Tell him, if you like, that it is through following my follies that you have come to grief; he will be sure to pity you then.” There was a smile, a little sad, on his lips, as he said the last words, but it passed at once as he added: “Do your hear me? will you go?” “If you want me--yes.” “On your word, now?” “On my word.”