"Buckets," said Miss Tennant simply.
"Was it cards?" he asked.
"Cards, and betting—and the hopeless optimism of youth," said she.
"And you wish to lend him five thousand dollars, and your interest in him is platonic?"
"Nothing so ardent," said she demurely. "I wish him to pay his debts, to give me his word that he will neither drink nor gamble until he has paid back the debt to me, and I shall suggest that he go out to one of those big Western States and become a man."
"If anybody," said Mr. Hemingway with gallantry, "could lead a young gentleman to so sweeping a reform, it would be yourself."
"There is no sequence of generations," said Miss Tennant, "long enough to eradicate a drop of Irish blood."
Mr. Hemingway swept the jewels together and wrapped them in the tissue-paper in which she had brought them.
"Are you going to put them in your safe—or return them to me?" she asked plaintively.