Denvil nodded.
"Close on fifteen hundred, I think," he answered, truthfully.
"Why, in Heaven's name, didn't you tell me all this sooner?"
"Oh, I kept hoping to get square somehow—without that. I wanted to stay in your good books; and I saw you were rather down on chaps who are casual about money. But I seem to be made that way, and——"
"So are most of us, my dear chap. But it's up to you to make yourself some other way, if you don't want to come a cropper and leave the Service. I hope I am no Pharisee, but I've been reared to believe that living in debt is an aristocratic, and rather mean form of theft. My notion of you doesn't square with that; and I know a good man when I see one. You'll never mend matters, I assure you, by playing the fool over horses and cards. How about your mother?"
Denvil looked down at the blank sheet of foreign note-paper before him, and answered nothing. He was the only son of his mother, and she was a widow.
"Can't you see that the fact of your having no father to pull you up sharp puts you on your honour to keep straight in every way, on her account? Does she know anything about all this?"
"How could I tell her?" the Boy murmured, without looking up. "She thinks me no end of a fine chap; and—and—I'm hanged if I know how to answer her letters since—things have got so bad——"
"When did you write last?"