"What was it?" Charlie asked. "Can you tell me?"
"Certainly I can," Ned answered, smiling. "He had a cool head and he knew when to stop. And there isn't one in three thousand that knows when to stop, if they've got the bug."
"I don't see," Charlie remarked loftily, "why anybody wouldn't know when to stop."
"Well, they don't, kid," Ned replied sharply.
Charlie was silent for a while, digesting the information he had acquired. Ned got up to go.
"Will--will you take me, Ned?" Charlie asked hesitatingly.
Ned looked him over scornfully. The idea did not appeal to him. "You don't want to go, Ladue," he said pityingly. At the bottom of his heart he did not wish to be responsible in the remotest degree for Charlie's career. It did not need a seer to guess at Charlie's weakness. "Number seven is no place for you and I'd advise you to keep out of it. It's a regular game, there; a man's game. They'd skin you alive without a quiver. They won't take any of your pieces of paper and they won't give you back any ten dollars, either. I wouldn't advise you to go there, kid."
That "kid" settled it, if there was anything needed to settle what may have been ordained from his birth. At any rate, it was ordained that he should not overcome the inclination to that particular sin of his father without a struggle, and if there was one special thing which Charlie was not fitted to do it was to struggle in such a cause. He flushed.
"Only to look on," he pleaded. "It was just to look on that I wanted to go. I didn't mean to play, of course."
"No, of course not. They never do," Ned retorted cynically. Then he considered briefly, looking at Charlie the while with a certain disgust. Having given him advice which was certainly good, he had no further responsibility in the matter. "All right," he said. "If you're bound to go, I can get you by the nigger at the door, although he'd probably let you in anyway. You're a very promising subject."
So it happened that Patty waited in vain for Charlie. For a day she thought only that he must have been delayed--he was--and that, perhaps, he was staying in Cambridge to finish something in connection with his studies. She did not get so far as to try to imagine what it was, but she wondered and felt some resentment against the college authorities for keeping such a good boy as Charlie. On the second day she began to wonder if he could have gone to Mrs. Stump's to see his mother. She gave that question mature consideration and decided that he had. On the third day she was anxious about him and would have liked to go to Mrs. Ladue or to Sally and find out, but she did not like to do that. And on the morning of the next day Sally saved her the trouble by coming to ask about him.