. Yet for a moment there rose before her mental
vision the dim picture of some possible rival, and at the mere hint of
this she grew ashamed, and flamed into indignation against herself.

'Tell me,' she said; 'I insist on knowing.'

'Well, my dear,' said the old man miserably and reluctantly, I've been
told that his father hastened his own ruin with dice and cards.' It
was the first time he had mentioned Bommaney senior in his daughter's
hearing for a year. She looked at him with eyes still intent, but
somehow milder and less alarmed. 'Phil,' the old boy continued, 'I'm
afraid that Phil is travelling in his father's steps.'

'Phil a gambler!' she said, with an honest scorn of conviction. 'I know
better. What makes you think it?'

'There are a lot of beastly clubs at the West End,' said the old man,
beginning to struggle with his overcoat, partly because he wished to
avoid the girl's look, and partly because the motion was a relief
to him. 'Gambling-places. Places where men meet for no other earthly
purpose than to cheat one another. I'm as fond of a rubber at whist as
anybody; but no honest man would put his head into one of those holes of
infamy if he knew its character.'

'Are you speaking of Phil, papa?' she asked. Her voice was low and
tremulous, and there was almost a note of threatening in it. The
gentlest creature will fight for her own--a fact for which some of us
have reason to be grateful.

'Yes, my dear,' her father answered with a kind of sullen sadness; 'I'm
talking about Phil. He's a member of the vilest crowd of the whole
lot, and he's there night after night.' He dashed his overcoat into an
arm-chair with despairing anger, and went marching up and down the room.
'I saw him one night by accident as he was going in. I knew the place.
You might have knocked me down with a feather. I've watched him there
night after night. Don't tell me I hadn't the right to watch him. I had
the right My little girl shan't marry a gambler. I won't have my fortune
wasted by a gambler, and my child's heart broken. I took a room,' he
pursued wrathfully, 'opposite the place. I've sat there in the dark with
the window open, and caught the d---- worst cold I ever had in my life
watching for him. I've seen him go in again and again. He's a lost man,
I tell you,' he cried in answer to his daughter's look and gesture; 'the
man who has that vice in his blood is lost!'

He was storming loudly, for he was one of those in whom emo