"You can't mean that seriously," he faltered, his drink-flushed face paling. "Oh, you can't, Billy!"
"But I do. My transactions have been secret; through a broker in New York I bought copper on a margin. It kept going against me till all my funds and available collateral were used up. I was sure it would win. All hell told me it would win. I couldn't stand the disgrace of failure. It meant losing my position, too. I struggled with it all one night in the bank, and the next morning, when the time-lock opened the vaults, I took the money and, with it in my pocket, I went to New York and put it up."
"You did? You did? My God! Billy, and lost it!"
"Within twenty-four hours. Charlie, you have been a drunkard, but your soul has remained clean. But I'm lost—I'm lost. I'll be sent to jail. My wife will shrink in shame from the public gaze. My child will grow up to see that I have set her, by my own act, into a despised class. Great God! that little trusting thing will have to bear my just punishment! So—so you thought I'd come here to reproach you, eh? You say you have been turned out of a club. I am being turned into a prison. Charlie, I was a coward when I took that money. I am a coward now, and I cannot face this thing. You must not object to what I have to do. It is dishonorable, but it is more honorable than the other."
"You don't mean—you can't mean—"
"There is nothing else to do, Charlie. Don't you see that in this way it will be all over at once? Think of the arrest, the long trial, the certain conviction, the parting, the stripes, the clipped hair! No, no, you must not oppose me. Ruth will forget me then, but, alive and in jail, I'd be a canker on her young soul. Lessie could marry again. God knows I'd want her to do so. Yes, it is the only way out, Charlie."
The drunkard seemed a drunkard no longer. He might have been an impassioned young priest full of a holy desire to comfort as he stood before the wilted man and clasped his hands. He knelt at his brother's knees, he caught the tense fingers in his.
"You shall not kill yourself!" he cried. "God will show you a way to avoid it. I feel it within me. There must be a way—there must!"
"There is no other way!" William groaned. "I've thought of everything under heaven till I'm crazed with it all." He stood up. He put his limp arm about the shoulders of his brother.
"Will it be known at once? Do the directors suspect?" Charles asked.