Roland: and Roland could not stoop to be a spy. And the son's heart
grew harder and harder against his father, and his father's face now
never smiled on him. Then bills came in, and duns knocked at the door,
--bills and duns to a man who shrank from the thought of a debt as an
ermine from a spot on its fur! And the son's short answer to
remonstrance was: "Am I not a gentleman? These are the things gentlemen
require." Then perhaps Roland remembered the experiment of his French
friend, and left his bureau unlocked, and said, "Ruin me if you will,
but no debts. There is money in those drawers,--they are unlocked."
That trust would forever have cured of extravagance a youth with a high
and delicate sense of honor: the pupil of the Gitanos did not understand
the trust; he thought it conveyed a natural, though ungracious,
permission to take out what he wanted,--and he took! To Roland this
seemed a theft; and a theft of the coarsest kind; but when he so said,
the son started indignant, and saw in that which had been so touching an
appeal to his honor but a trap to decoy him into disgrace. In short,
neither could understand the other. Roland forbade his son to stir from
the house; and the young man the same night let himself out, and stole
forth into the wide world, to enjoy or defy it in his own wild way.

It would be tedious to follow him through his various adventures and
experiments on fortune (even if I knew them all, which I do not). And
now putting altogether aside his right name, which he had voluntarily
abandoned, and not embarrassing the reader with the earlier aliases
assumed, I shall give to my unfortunate kinsman the name by which I
first knew him, and continue to do so until,--Heaven grant the time may
come!--having first redeemed, he may reclaim his own. It was in joining
a set of strolling players that Vivian became acquainted with Peacock;
and that worthy, who had many strings to his bow, soon grew aware of
Vivian's extraordinary skill with the cue, and saw therein a better mode