d see the sport out. "Have to cough your way through, my boy!" he
said, as he swayed back and forth, the hard cough hacking in his throat.

As he had said yesterday, there was only one thing to do: he must
have that five thousand dollars which was to be handed over by the old
seigneur. This time he did not attempt to find excuses; he called the
thing by its proper name.

"Well, it's stealing, or it's highway robbery, no matter how one looks
at it," he said to himself. "I wonder what's the matter with me. I must
have got started wrong somehow. Money to spend, playing at soldiering,
made to believe I'd have a pot of money and an estate, and then told one
fine day that a son and heir, with health in form and feature, was come,
and Esau must go. No profession, except soldiering, debt staring me in
the face, and a nasty mess of it all round. I wonder why it is that
I didn't pull myself together, be honest to a hair, and fight my way
through? I suppose I hadn't it in me. I wasn't the right metal at the
start. There's always been a black sheep in our family, a gentleman or
a lady, born without morals, and I happen to be the gentleman this
generation. I always knew what was right, and liked it, and I always did
what was wrong, and liked it--nearly always. But I suppose I was fated.
I was bound to get into a hole, and I'm in it now, with one lung, and a
wife in prospect to support. I suppose if I were to write down all the
decent things I've thought in my life, and put them beside the indecent
things I've done, nobody would believe the same man was responsible for
them. I'm one of the men who ought to be put above temptation; be well
bridled, well fed, and the mere cost of comfortable living provided, and
then I'd do big things. But that isn't the way of the world; and so I
feel that a morning like this, and the love of a girl like that" (he
nodded towards the horizon into which Christine had gone) "ought to make
a man sing a Te Deum. And yet this evening, or to-morrow evening, or the
next, I'll steal five thousand dollars, if it can be done, and risk my
neck in doing it--to say nothing of family honour, and what not."

He got up from the window, went to his trunk, opened it, and, taking
out a pistol, examined it carefully, cocking and uncorking it, and after
loading it, and again trying the trigger, put it back again. There came
a tap at the door, and to his call a servant entered with a glass of
milk and whiskey, with which h