Something happened last night to
increase his anxiety. I have often wondered how he managed to get
enough money to enable him to spend three days in New York, and
last night he told me. He came in just after I had got back to the
house after leaving you and that girl, and he was very scared. It
seems that when the letter from the London lawyer came telling him
that he had been left a hundred dollars, he got the idea of
raising money on the strength of it. You know Nutty by this time,
so you won't be surprised at the way he went about it. He borrowed
a hundred dollars from the man at the chemist's on the security of
that letter, and then--I suppose it seemed so easy that it struck
him as a pity to let the opportunity slip--he did the same thing
with four other tradesmen. Nutty's so odd that I don't know even
now whether it ever occurred to him that he was obtaining money
under false pretences; but the poor tradesmen hadn't any doubt
about it at all. They compared notes and found what had happened,
and last night, while we were in the woods, one of them came here
and called Nutty a good many names and threatened him with
imprisonment.
'You can imagine how delighted Nutty was when I came in and told
him that I was engaged to you. In his curious way, he took it for
granted that I had heard about his financial operations, and was
doing it entirely for his sake, to get him out of his fix.
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