“Only yesterday,” continued Wallop, complacently, evidently noticing and enjoying my confusion, “he was asking me what I thought of your credit. Shoddy and I are chummy you know, Crow.”
“Will you shut up and let me get on with my work?” I cried, despairingly.
“I told him,” continued Wallop, deliberately, “I knew you only had twelve bob a week, and that, though you were a very nice boy, I would advise him to proceed with caution, as I knew for a fact—”
I sprang from my seat, determined, if I could not silence him by persuasion, I would do it by force. However, he adroitly fortified himself behind his desk, and proceeded, greatly to the amusement of every one but Jack, “I knew for a fact you owed a pot of money at the tuck shop—”
Here the speaker had to pause for the laughter which this announcement had elicited.
“And that the Twins had advanced you getting on for half-a-sov., besides—”
There was no escape. I sank down in my seat and let him go on as he liked.
I had the satisfaction of hearing a full, true, and particular account of my debts and delinquencies, which every one—I could not for the world tell how—seemed to know all about, and I had the still greater satisfaction of knowing that my friend Smith was hearing of my extravagances now for the first time, and not from my lips.
What would he think of me? How strange he must think it in me not to have trusted in him when he had confided to me his own far more important secret. I felt utterly ashamed. And yet, when I came to think of it, if I had acted foolishly, I had not committed a crime. Why should I be ashamed?
“I say,” I began, when that evening we were walking home, rather moodily, side by side—“I say, you must have been astonished by what those fellows were saying to-day, Jack.”