"Very good. Two jacks and two queens—I'll take that pot, boys. I'll be with you in a second, Billy—just one hand more."
It is Frank Mansfield, and no one else, we are sorry to say, who again deals the cards around, and with flushed face, being evidently considerably the worse for drink, a moment later joins Detective Cutts in the private wine-room, to the left of Mr. Dyball's bar.
What brings the boy to a place like this?
Disappointment and a fatal love of exciting pleasures, yielded to too often—far too often—in the past.
Firm in his resolution to reform his ways, Frank, who loved the daughter of Elijah Callister, and was devotedly loved by her in return, had, at her own suggestion, asked of the stock operator the hand of his daughter in marriage with the ill success already told.
Now, instead of meeting that refusal like a man—instead of returning to the object of his affections at the house of a mutual friend, who loved them both, and where they had been in the habit of meeting at intervals in the past—Frank had sought to drown his sorrows by that fatal method—recourse to the whisky bottle and glass.
One drink had been followed by another, the second by a third, until, reckless of the consequences, the boy had yielded to a temptation which he had for days been struggling to resist, and which—— But that brings us back to Detective Cutts again!
"Well, young fellow, what shall it be?" asked that individual, touching the little call bell upon the table by which he had seated himself the moment Frank appeared.
"Oh! I don't care—whisky, I suppose. What do you want of me? The same old scheme?"
"Of course. What else should it be?" answered the detective, calling for the drinks, which were speedily produced and consumed. "You can't do better than to join me in that, and I suppose you have made up your mind to do so, since you are here by the appointment we made."