The letter dropped from his hand and he looked at the cheque with a kind of despair. Fifty pounds! In his extremity it was useless. How foolish he had been not to ask Miss Letty for the whole sum at once! He took up the letter and read it again—again and again he looked at the cheque.
“Had I better go and see her?” he meditated. “But if I do I shall have to tell her all about the row at Sandhurst,—and this gambling business—she will think me a regular villain. She must be quite an old lady now—and I should worry her to death. She would be so disappointed in me——”
He looked at the cheque again,—and then—like a black cloud crossing the horizon, a Thought began to creep over his mind, darkening it steadily into gloom. He sat quiet, fingering the cheque and Miss Letty’s letter together, his face growing paler and paler,—his eyes harder and colder—his form rigid.
“People should always write the amount they are drawing in plain letters on their cheques,” he half-whispered with dry lips—“Miss Letty should have written the word ‘fifty,’ not the figure ‘50.’”
He put away letter and cheque and went to bed early,—not to sleep but to toss about restlessly all night long. What a horrible time he passed!—what fretting dreams tortured him!—what strange and evil faces haunted him, chief among which were those of the “Marquis” de Gramont and his fascinating daughter Lenore—and the smooth cold handsome face of the officer who had first tempted him to drink at Sandhurst. Of his mother and father he never thought,—they had never shown him the slightest sympathy. Once, during this wretched night of fleeting visions, he saw the bent crooked figure and wrinkled countenance of the old sailor Rattling Jack, whose last words had been “I’ll just think o’ ye as if ye were dead.” Death was better than disgrace—and yet—Miss Letty was so good a woman—she had loved him so much—she would be sure to forgive him—if——!
With the daylight he rose and sat at his writing-table, vaguely turning over bits of paper and scribbling figures on them without any apparent intention,—then after a hurried breakfast he went out. At about half-past ten he made his way to Miss Letty’s bank and drawing her cheque out of his pocket, passed it across the counter. The cashier glanced at it with a little uplifting of his eyebrows.
“All in notes, or would you like any gold?” he demanded.
Boy was staring fixedly in front of him and did not hear. The cashier was busy, and spoke again impatiently and with a suspicious glance.
“Notes or gold? Will you have all notes or any gold?”
“Notes, please,” answered Boy in a low voice.