"No," he said. "I don't want him to know I'm here—yet. I—I came to see you." He paused, twisting his cloth cap in his fingers.
He was in a desperate strait. His brother's silence since his visit to the house in Aoyama (of which Phil had learned from the servant) had seemed to mean the worst. The place had contained sufficient documents in evidence as to his mode of living, and the reflection opened gloomy vistas of poverty from which he turned with abject fear and dread. There was one alternative, and this, a grisly shadow, had stalked beside him since an evening when he had dined with Bersonin. It had peopled his sleep with terrifying visions which even Haru and the brandy had been unable to banish, and his waking hours had been haunted by the expert's yellowish eyes. Between devil and deep sea, he had heard of his brother's engagement, and the wild thought of appealing to him through Barbara had come to him as a forlorn hope. Now, face to face with her, he found the words difficult to say.
"Won't you sit down?" she said, and took a chair opposite him, looking at him inquiringly.
"I ought to apologize for a rig like this," he went on, glancing at his sorry raiment, "but I came in a friend's motor, and I'm going back to-night. I thought you wouldn't mind, now—now that you are engaged to marry Austen. You are, aren't you?"
She inclined her head. "Yes," she said slowly, "I have promised to marry him."
"Then you know him pretty well, and you know that he—that he doesn't altogether approve of me."
"I have never heard him say that," she interrupted quickly.
"It's true, though," he rejoined bitterly. "He's always been down on me. I'm not staid enough for him. He made his money by grubbing, and he thinks everybody else ought to do the same. It's—it's the matter of money I want to speak to you about."
He paused again. "Yes?" she said.
"Since I left college," he went on, "Austen has always made me an allowance. But I've been out here a year now, and I—well, you know what the East is. I've had to live as other young fellows do, and I've spent more than he gives me. I've—played some, too, and then this spring I got hit hard at the races. It was just a run of bad luck, when I had expected to square myself."