"And your board?" "And my board." "It was very good. It is a great deal better than anything you are likely to get here. How long were you with the planter?" "Ten months." "Only ten months! You must allow an older head than yours to continue thinking it is a pity you are not there still. Now, as to money matters, your father would doubtless cease sending you remittances once you were earning money for yourself?" "No, he sent me fifty pounds last Christmas." "Then, at any rate, you have brought enough home to prevent your being a burden to your mother? Between fifty and a hundred pounds, I take it?" Harry shook his head; it was hot with a shame he would have owned to anybody in the world but Mr. Walthew. "Not fifty pounds?" "No." "How much, then?" "Not a penny!" The clergyman opened his eyes and lifted his hands in unaffected horror. Harry could not help smiling in his face--could not have helped it if he had stood convicted of a worse crime than extravagance. "You have spent every penny--and you smile!" the uncle cried. "You come home to find your mother at starvation's door--and you smile! You have spent her substance in--in----" "Riot!" suggested Harry wickedly. "Sheer riot and evil living! Oh, Uncle Spencer, don't look like that; it's not exactly true; but, can't you see, I had no idea what was going to happen here at home? I thought I was coming back to live on the fat of the land, and when I'd made my miserable pile I spent it--like a man, I thought--like a criminal, if you will. Whichever it was, you must know which I feel now. And whatever I have done I am pretty badly punished. But at least I mean to take my punishment like a man, and to work like one, too, at any mortal thing I can find to do." Mr. Walthew looked down his nose at the carpet on which he stood. He had sense enough to see that the lad was in earnest now, and that it was of no use to reproach him further with what was past. "It seems to me, Henry," he said at length, "that it's a case of ability rather than of will. You say you are ready to do anything; the question is--what can you do?" "Not many things," confessed Henry, in a humbler voice; "but I can learn, Uncle Spencer--I will do my best to learn." "How old are you, Henry?" "Twenty-one." Harry was about to add "yesterday," but refrained from making his statement of fact an appeal for sympathy; for the man in him was coming steadily to the front. "Then you would leave school in the Sixth Form?" Harry had to shake his head. "Perhaps you were on the Modern Side? All the better if you were!" "No, I was not; I left in the form below the Sixth." "Then you know nothing about book-keeping, for example?" "I wish I did." "But you are a fair mathematician?" "It was my weakest point."