"'Rot!' I replied, with less elegance than terseness."
"Would you like me to be a thief, George Cranleigh? If I choose to be a thief, I can slip out very lightly. But if I prefer to be an honest man, there is very small chance of my doing it."
He told me in a few words what his position was, owing to a panic which had ended in a crash, through the roguery of a few, and the folly of the many; and how his own firm had become involved in thoroughly unsound transactions, mainly through his own inattention and his confidence in a very clever fellow, who had cut things a little too fine at last, as very clever fellows nearly always do.
"We must lose a quarter of a million," he said, "even if we pull through at all, which is more than doubtful. All depends upon to-morrow. But it is not for myself that I care, George. It is for your darling sister—the best, and the bravest, and the most unselfish girl—why she wanted to stick to me through everything! She behaved as if it could make no difference between us."
"I should hope so indeed. I would disown her if she did otherwise. Did you think that she was going to have you for your money, Jackson?"
"I am not quite so bad as that, you may be sure. Still you must excuse a modest fellow for thinking his money the best part of him." Here I was glad to see one of his old dry smiles. "But the point of it is this, as you know well enough without my telling—I can have nothing more to say to Grace, who was worth all my cash, and my credit, and ambitions, and everything except my conscience to me."
"That is all very fine, and very lofty in its way," I answered with a superior smile, which refreshed him, as it was meant to do; "and among City people it may hold good, or the big world of the Clubland. But no sound Englishman takes it so. You don't suppose that my father approved of your going in for our Grace, because you then were a wealthy man, I should hope." I spoke with strong confidence; but perhaps the strength of it was chiefly in my voice.
"God forbid!" he replied with horror; while I tried not to doubt that God had forbidden. "No, I am well aware that Sir Harold disliked it from the first, and Lady Cranleigh even more. It was nothing but the goodness of dear Grace. And that makes it such a frightful thing for me. Why, that Angel was ready to stick to me, like—like a brick, if I only would allow it. A man who knows the world would never believe it for a moment."
"Then he must know a very bad world, and be a worthy member of it. What do you suppose I would have done to my sister, if she had been mean enough to shy off, because of your misfortune?"