CHAPTER XXX
"Yes;—a Lie!"
"So you went to Happerton after all," said Lopez to his ally, Mr. Sextus Parker. "You couldn't believe me when I told you the money was all right! What a cur you are!"
"That's right;—abuse me."
"Well, it was horrid. Didn't I tell you that it must necessarily injure me with the house? How are two fellows to get on together unless they can put some trust in each other? Even if I did run you into a difficulty, do you really think I'm ruffian enough to tell you that the money was there if it were untrue?"
Sexty looked like a cur and felt like a cur, as he was being thus abused. He was not angry with his friend for calling him bad names, but only anxious to excuse himself. "I was out of sorts," he said, "and so d––––d hippish I didn't know what I was about."
"Brandy-and-soda!" suggested Lopez.
"Perhaps a little of that;—though, by Jove, it isn't often I do that kind of thing. I don't know a fellow who works harder for his wife and children than I do. But when one sees such things all round one,—a fellow utterly smashed here who had a string of hunters yesterday, and another fellow buying a house in Piccadilly and pulling it down because it isn't big enough, who was contented with a little box at Hornsey last summer, one doesn't quite know how to keep one's legs."
"If you want to learn a lesson look at the two men, and see where the difference lies. The one has had some heart about him, and the other has been a coward."
Parker scratched his head, balanced himself on the hind legs of his stool, and tacitly acknowledged the truth of all that his enterprising friend said to him. "Has old Wharton come down well?" at last he asked.