done it. I had no right to take the risk. But Mr.
Phillips said--he said----"

"Eh?" Sears' interruption this time was quite unpremeditated.
"Phillips?" he repeated, sharply. "Egbert, you mean? Oh, yes....
Humph.... Is he mixed up in this?"

"Why--why, yes. If it hadn't been for him it wouldn't have happened. I
don't mean that he is to blame, exactly. I guess nobody is to blame but
myself. But when I think---- Oh, Cap'n Kendrick, do you suppose you can
help me out of it? If you can, I----"

Here followed another outburst of agonized entreaty. The boy's nerves
were close to breaking, he was almost hysterical. Slowly and with the
exercise of much patience and tact the captain drew from him the details
of his trouble. It was, as he told it, a long and complicated story,
but, boiled down, it amounted to something like this:

Kent and Phillips had been very friendly for some time, their intimacy
beginning even before the latter came to board at Sarah Macomber's.
Egbert's polished manners, his stories of life abroad, his easy
condescending geniality, had from the first made a great impression upon
George. The latter, already esteeming himself above the average of
mentality and enterprise in what he considered the "slow-poke" town of
Bayport, found in the brilliant arrival from foreign parts the
personification of his ideals, a satisfying specimen of that much read
of _genus_, "the complete man of the world." He fell on his knees before
that specimen and worshiped. Such idolatry could not but have some
effect, even upon as _blase_ an idol as Mr. Phillips, so the latter at
first tolerated and then even encouraged the acquaintanceship. He began
to take this young follower more and more into his confidence, to speak
with him concerning matters more intimate and personal.

George soon gathered that Egbert had been much in moneyed circles. He
spoke casually of the "market" and referred to friends who had made and
remade fortunes in stocks, as well as of others whose horses had brought
them riches, or who had brought off what he called _coups_ at foreign
gaming tables. The young man, who had been brought up in a strict
Puritanical household, was at first rather shocked at the thought of
gambling or racing, but Mr. Phillips treated his prejudices in a
condescendingly joking way, and Kent gradually grew ashamed of his
"insularity" and _bourgeois_ ideas. Egbert habitually read the stock
quotations in the Boston _Advertiser_ and th