All this he might do and not become so degraded but that his friends would talk to him and play cards with him.

But to have sat down to a whist-table and not be able to pay the stakes was held to be so foul a disgrace that men did not wonder that he should have disappeared.
Such was the cause alleged for the captain's disappearance among his intimate friends; but by degrees more than his intimate friends came to talk of it.

In a short time his name was in all the newspapers, and there was not a constable in London whose mind was not greatly exercised on the matter.

All Scotland Yard and the police-officers were busy.

Mr.
Grey, in Lincoln's Inn, was much troubled on the matter.