Lawrence felt that his companion was going to address him; he began to draw off his gloves. The stranger suddenly came towards him, stopped a moment, eyed him again with insolent intensity, and then seated himself on the sofa beside him. His first movement was to seize the young man’s arm. “He is simply crazy!” thought Lawrence. Roger was now able to appreciate the pathetic disrepair of his appearance. His open waistcoat displayed a soiled and crumpled shirt-bosom, from whose empty buttonholes the studs had recently been wrenched. In his normal freshness he must have looked like a gambler with a run of luck. He spoke in a rapid, excited tone, with a hard, petulant voice. “You’ll think me crazy, I suppose. Well, I shall be soon. Will you lend me a hundred dollars?” “Who are you? What is your trouble?” Roger asked. “My name would tell you nothing. I’m a stranger here. My trouble,—it’s a long story! But it’s grievous, I assure you. It’s pressing upon me with a fierceness that grows while I sit here talking to you. A hundred dollars would stave it off,—a few days at least. Don’t refuse me!” These last words were uttered half as an entreaty, half as a threat. “Don’t say you haven’t got them,—a man that wears such pretty gloves! Come; you look like a good fellow. Look at me! I’m a good fellow, too. I don’t need to swear to my being in distress.” Lawrence was touched, disgusted, and irritated. The man’s distress was real enough, but there was something horribly disreputable in his manner. Roger declined to entertain his request without learning more about him. From the stranger’s persistent reluctance to do more than simply declare that he was from St. Louis, and repeat that he was in a tight place, in a d——d tight place, Lawrence was led to believe that he had been dabbling in crime. The more he insisted upon some definite statement of his circumstances, the more fierce and peremptory became the other’s petition. Lawrence was before all things deliberate and perspicacious; the last man in the world to be hustled and bullied. It was quite out of his nature to do a thing without distinctly knowing why. He of course had no imagination, which, as we know, should always stand at the right hand of charity; but he had good store of that wholesome discretion whose place is at the left. Discretion told him that his companion was a dissolute scoundrel, who had sinned through grievous temptation, perhaps, but who had certainly sinned. His misery was palpable, but Roger felt that he could not patch up his misery without in some degree condoning his vices. It was not in his power, at any rate, to present him, out of hand, a hundred dollars. He compromised. “I can’t think of giving you the sum you ask,” he said. “I have no time, moreover, to investigate your case at present. If you will meet me here to-morrow morning, I will listen to anything you shall have made up your mind to say. Meanwhile, here are ten dollars.”