Guy flung himself down in his easy-chair, with a look of utter despondency upon his handsome face. "But I promised Cyril," he exclaimed, with a groan, "I'd never touch that. If I were to spend it I don't know how I could ever face Cyril."
"I was told yesterday," Nevitt answered, with a bitter little smile, "and by a lady, too, many times over, that circumstances alter cases, till I began to believe it. When you promised Cyril you weren't face to face with a financial crisis. If you were to use the money temporarily--mind, I say only temporarily; for to my certain knowledge Rio Negros will pull through all right in the end--if you were to use it temporarily in such an emergency as this, no blame of any sort could possibly attach to you. The unknown benefactor won't mind whether your money's at your banker's, or employed for the time being in paying your debts. Your creditors will. If I were you, therefore, I'd use it up in paying them."
"You would?" Guy inquired, glancing across at him, with a faint gleam of hope in his eye.
Nevitt fixed him at once with his strange cold stare, He had caught his man now. He could play upon him as readily as he could play his violin.
"Why, certainly I would," he answered, with confidence, striking the new chord full. "Cyril himself would do the same in your place, I'll bet you. And the proof that he would is simply this--you yourself will do it. Depend upon it, if you can do anything, under given circumstances, Cyril would do it too, in the same set of conditions. And if ever Cyril feels inclined to criticise what you've done, you can answer him back, 'I know your heart as you know mine. In my place, I know you'd have acted as I did.'"
"Cyril and I are not absolutely identical," Guy answered slowly, his eyes still fixed on Montague Nevitt's. "Sometimes I feel he does things I wouldn't do."
"He has more initiative than you," Nevitt answered, as if carelessly, though with deep design in his heart. "He acts where you debate. You're often afraid to take a serious step. Cyril never hesitates. You draw back and falter; Cyril goes straight ahead. But all the more reason, accordingly, that Cyril should admit the lightness of whatever you do, for if you do anything--anything in the nature of a definite step, I mean--why, far more readily, then, would Cyril, in like case, have done it."