Presently old Jonas shuffled in with Madeira, cakes, and sandwiches, and Stephen began on them immediately.

“I came over so you could see me in my uniform,” he explained; “and I’m going back right away to see mother and Paige and Marye and Camilla.”  He paused, sandwich suspended, then swallowed what he had been chewing and took another bite, recklessly.

“I’m very fond of Camilla,” he said condescendingly.  “She’s very nice about my going—­the only one who hasn’t snivelled.  I tell you, Ailsa, Camilla is a good deal of a girl. . . .  And I’ve promised to look out for her uncle—­keep an eye on old Lent, you know, which seems to comfort her a good deal when she begins crying——­

“Oh. . .  I thought Camilla didn’t cry.”

“She cries a little—­now and then.”

“About her uncle?”

“Certainly.”

Ailsa looked down at her ringless fingers.  Within the week she had laid away both rings, meaning to resume them some day.

“If you and your father go, your office will be closed, I suppose.”

“Oh, no.  Farren will run it.”

“I see. . . .  And Mr. Berkley, too, I suppose.”

Stephen looked up from his bitten seedcake.

“Berkley?  He left long ago.”

“Left—­where?” she asked, confused.

“Left the office.  It couldn’t be helped.  There was nothing for him to do.  I was sorry—­I’m sorrier now——­”

He checked himself, hesitated, turned his troubled eyes on Ailsa.

“I did like him so much.”

“Don’t you like him—­still?”

“Yes—­I do.  I don’t know what was the matter with that man.  He went all to pieces.”

“W-what!”

“Utterly.  Isn’t it too bad.”

She sat there very silent, very white.  Stephen bit into another cake, angrily.

“It’s the company he keeps,” he said—­“a lot of fast men—­fast enough to be talked about, fashionable enough to be tolerated—­Jack Casson is one of them, and that little ass, Arthur Wye. That’s the crowd—­a horse-racing, hard-drinking, hard-gambling crew.”

“But—­he is—­Mr. Berkley’s circumstances—­how can he do such things——­”

“Some idiot—­even Berkley doesn’t know who—­took all those dead stocks off his hands.  Wasn’t it the devil’s own luck for Berkley to find a market in times like these?”

“But it ended him. . . .  Oh, I was fond of him, I tell you, Ailsa!  I hate like thunder to see him this way——­”

“What way!”

“Oh, not caring for anybody or anything.  He’s never sober.  I don’t mean that I ever saw him otherwise—­he doesn’t get drunk like an ordinary man:  he just turns deathly white and polite.  I’ve met him—­and his friends—­several times.  They’re too fast a string of colts for me.  But isn’t it a shame that a man like Berkley should go to the devil—­and for no reason at all?”

“Yes,” she said.