Spider looked interested. He leaned across the table, his darting, peculiar glance shifting searchingly from first one of Rollie's eyes to the other, his form half crouching, his whole body alert, cruelty depicted on his face and suggesting that his nickname was no accident but a sure bit of underworld characterization.
"Make it three thousand, and I'll lay the money in your hand," said the Spider coldly.
Rollie's case was desperate. He drew a blank note from his pocket, filled it, and signed it; then passed it across the table. But with the Spider's seventeen hundred deep in his trousers pockets, the feeling that he had been grossly taken advantage of seemed to demand of Rollie that his manhood should assert itself.
"Spider, you are a thief!" he proclaimed truculently.
"I guess you must be one yourself, or you wouldn't want seventeen hundred in such a hell of a hurry," was Spider's cool rejoinder, as he practically shoved Rollie out of his back door.
Now this retort of Spider's was quite a shock to Rollie; but there are shocks and shocks. Moreover, when the executors upon their scheduled hour came to Rollo Charles Burbeck, trustee, and found his accounts and cash balancing to a cent, which was exactly as they expected to find them, why this in itself was some compensation for taking the back-talk even of a bookmaker.
But the next day Spider Welsh's roll was the fatter by three thousand dollars, and the trust account was short the same amount.
Thereafter, and despite good resolutions, the size of the defalcation began immediately to grow again, although Rollo, if he suffered much anxiety on that account, concealed it admirably. He knew that under the system he was safe for the present, and outwardly he moulted no single feather, but wore his well tailored clothes with the same sleek distinction, and laughed, chatted, and danced his way farther and farther into the good graces of clambering society, partly sustained by the hope that even though lotteries and horse races failed him, and the "Old Man's" heart proved adamant, some rich woman's tender fancy might fasten itself upon him, and a wealthy marriage become the savior of his imperiled fortunes.
It was while still in this state of being, but with that semi-annual turning over of dead papers again only a few weeks distant, Rollo was greatly amazed to blunder into the presence of Marien Dounay in his mother's sun-room at four o'clock one afternoon, when chance had sent him home to don a yachting costume. A little out of touch with things at All People's, the young man's surprise at finding Miss Dounay tête-à-tête with his own mother was the greater by the fact that he knew a score of ambitious matrons who were at the very time pulling every string within their reach to get the actress on exhibition as one of their social possessions.
Because young Burbeck's interest in women was by the nature of his association with them largely mercenary, and just now peculiarly so on account of his own haunting embarrassment, he was rather impervious to the physical charms of Miss Dounay herself. He only saw something brilliant, dazzling, convertible, and exerted himself to impress her favorably, postponing the departure upon his yachting trip dangerously it would seem, had not the two got on so well together that the actress offered to take him in her car to shorten his tardiness at the yacht pier.