This page contains affiliate links. As Amazon Associates we earn from qualifying purchases.
Language:
Form:
Genre:
Published:
  • 1913
Edition:
Collection:
Tags:
Buy it on Amazon FREE Audible 30 days

the straight, correctly cut lines of black and white. The mere change of clothes had suddenly changed the man himself–had “done something to him,” Pearson put it. After his first glance at the mirror he had straightened himself, as if recognizing the fault of his own carriage. When he crossed the room it was with the action of a man who has been trained to move well. The good looks, which had been almost hidden behind a veil of uncertainty of expression and strained fearfulness, became obvious. He was tall, and his lean limbs were splendidly hung together. His head was perfectly set, and the bearing of his square shoulders was a soldierly thing. It was an extraordinarily handsome man Tembarom and Pearson found themselves gazing at. Each glanced involuntarily at the other.

“Now that’s first-rate! I’m glad you feel like coming,” Tembarom plunged in. He didn’t intend to give him too much time to think.

“Thank you. It will be a change, as you said,” Strangeways answered. “One needs change.”

His deep eyes looked somewhat deeper than usual, but his manner was that of any well-bred man doing an accustomed thing. If he had been an ordinary guest in the house, and his host had dropped into his room, he would have comported himself in exactly the same way.

They went together down the corridor as if they had passed down it together a dozen times before. On the stairway Strangeways looked at the tapestries with the interest of a familiarized intelligence.

“It is a beautiful old place,” he said, as they crossed the hall. “That armor was worn by a crusader.” He hesitated a moment when they entered the library, but it was only for a moment. He went to the hearth and took the chair his host offered him, and, lighting a cigar, sat smoking it. If T. Tembarom had chanced to be a man of an analytical or metaphysical order of intellect he would have found, during the past month, many things to lead him far in mental argument concerning the weird wonder of the human mind–of its power where its possessor, the body, is concerned, its sometime closeness to the surface of sentient being, its sometime remoteness. He would have known–awed, marveling at the blackness of the pit into which it can descend–the unknown shades that may enfold it and imprison its gropings. The old Duke of Stone had sat and pondered many an hour over stories his favorite companion had related to him. What curious and subtle processes had the queer fellow not been watching in the closely guarded quiet of the room where the stranger had spent his days; the strange thing cowering in its darkness; the ray of light piercing the cloud one day and seeming lost again the next; the struggles the imprisoned thing made to come forth– to cry out that it was but immured, not wholly conquered, and that some hour would arrive when it would fight its way through at last. Tembarom had not entered into psychological research. He had been entirely uncomplex in his attitude, sitting down before his problem as a besieger might have sat down before a castle. The duke had sometimes wondered whether it was not a good enough thing that he had been so simple about it, merely continuing to believe the best with an unswerving obstinacy and lending a hand when he could. A never flagging sympathy had kept him singularly alive to every chance, and now and then he had illuminations which would have done credit to a cleverer man, and which the duke had rubbed his hands over in half-amused, half- touched elation. How he had kept his head level and held to his purpose!

T. Tembarom talked but little as he sat in his big chair and smoked. Best let him alone and give him time to get used to the newness, he thought. Nothing must happen that could give him a jolt. Let things sort of sink into him, and perhaps they’d set him to thinking and lead him somewhere. Strangeways himself evidently did not want talk. He never wanted it unless he was excited. He was not excited now, and had settled down as if he was comfortable. Having finished one cigar he took another, and began to smoke it much more slowly than he had smoked his first. The slowness began to arrest Tembarom’s attention. This was the smoking of a man who was either growing sleepy or sinking into deep thought, becoming oblivious to what he was doing. Sometimes he held the cigar absently between his strong, fine fingers, seeming to forget it. Tembarom watched him do this until he saw it go out, and its white ash drop on the rug at his feet. He did not notice it, but sat sinking deeper and deeper into his own being, growing more remote. What was going on under his absorbed stillness? Tembarom would not have moved or spoken “for a block of Fifth Avenue,” he said internally. The dark eyes seemed to become darker until there was only a pin’s point of light to be seen in their pupils. It was as if he were looking at something at a distance–at a strangely long distance. Twice he turned his head and appeared to look slowly round the room, but not as normal people look– as if it also was at the strange, long distance from him, and he were somewhere outside its walls. It was an uncanny thing to be a spectator to.

“How dead still the room is!” Tembarom found himself thinking.

It was “dead still.” And it was a queer deal sitting, not daring to move–just watching. Something was bound to happen, sure! What was it going to be?

Strangeways’ cigar dropped from his fingers and appeared to rouse him. He looked puzzled for a moment, and then stooped quite naturally to pick it up.

“I forgot it altogether. It’s gone out,” he remarked.

“Have another,” suggested Tembarom, moving the box nearer to him.

“No, thank you.” He rose and crossed the room to the wall of book- shelves. And Tembarom’s eye was caught again by the fineness of movement and line the evening clothes made manifest. “What a swell he looked when he moved about like that! What a swell, by jings!”

He looked along the line of shelves and presently took a book down and opened it. He turned over its leaves until something arrested his attention, and then he fell to reading. He read several minutes, while Tembarom watched him. The silence was broken by his laughing a little.

“Listen to this,” he said, and began to read something in a language totally unknown to his hearer. “A man who writes that sort of thing about a woman is an old bounder, whether he’s a poet or not. There’s a small, biting spitefulness about it that’s cattish.”

“Who did it?” Tembarom inquired softly. It might be a good idea to lead him on.

“Horace. In spite of his genius, he sometimes makes you feel he was rather a blackguard.”

“Horace!” For the moment T. Tembarom forgot himself. “I always heard he was a sort of Y.M.C.A. old guy–old Horace Greeley. The Tribune was no yellow journal when he had it.”

He was sorry he had spoken the next moment. Strangeways looked puzzled.

“The Tribune,” he hesitated. “The Roman Tribune?”

“No, New York. He started it–old Horace did. But perhaps we’re not talking of the same man.”

Strangeways hesitated again.

“No, I think we’re not,” he answered politely.

“I’ve made a break,” thought Tembarom. “I ought to have kept my mouth shut. I must try to switch him back.”

Strangeways was looking down at the back of the book he held in his hand.

“This one was the Latin poet, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65 B. C. You know him,” he said.

“Oh, that one!” exclaimed Tembarom, as if with an air of immense relief. “What a fool I was to forget! I’m glad it’s him. Will you go on reading and let me hear some more? He’s a winner from Winnersville- – that Horace is.”

Perhaps it was a sort of miracle, accomplished by his great desire to help the right thing to happen, to stave off any shadow of the wrong thing. Whatsoever the reason, Strangeways waited only a moment before turning to his book again. It seemed to be a link in some chain slowly forming itself to drag him back from his wanderings. And T. Tembarom, lightly sweating as a frightened horse will, sat smoking another pipe and listening intently to “Satires” and “Lampoons,” read aloud in the Latin of 65 B. C.

“By gee!” he said faithfully, at intervals, when he saw on the reader’s face that the moment was ripe. “He knew it all– old Horace– didn’t he?”

He had steered his charge back. Things were coming along the line to him. He’d learned Latin at one of these big English schools. Boys always learned Latin, the duke had told him. They just had to. Most of them hated it like thunder, and they used to be caned when they didn’t recite it right. Perhaps if he went on he’d begin to remember the school. A queer part of it was that he did not seem to notice that he was not reading his own language.

He did not, in fact, seem to remember anything in particular, but went on quite naturally for some minutes. He had replaced Horace on the shelf and was on the point of taking down another volume when he paused, as if recalling something else.

“Weren’t we going to see the picture-gallery?” he inquired. “Isn’t it getting late? I should like to see the portraits.”

“No hurry,” answered T. Tembarom. “I was just waiting till you were ready. But we’ll go right away, if you like.”

They went without further ceremony. As they walked through the hall and down the corridors side by side, an imaginative person might have felt that perhaps the eyes of an ancient darkling portrait or so looked down at the pair curiously: the long, loosely built New Yorker rather slouching along by the soldierly, almost romantic figure which, in a measure, suggested that others not unlike it might have trod the same oaken floor, wearing ruff and doublet, or lace jabot and sword. There was a far cry between the two, but they walked closely in friendly union. When they entered the picture-gallery Strangeways paused a moment again, and stood peering down its length.

“It is very dimly lighted. How can we see?” he said.

“I told Pearson to leave it dim,” Tembarom answered. “I wanted it just that way at first.”

He tried–and succeeded tolerably well–to say it casually, as he led the way ahead of them. He and the duke had not talked the scheme over for nothing. As his grace had said, they had “worked the thing up.” As they moved down the gallery, the men and women in their frames looked like ghosts staring out to see what was about to happen.

“We’ll turn up the lights after a while,” T. Tembarom explained, still casually. “There’s a picture here I think a good deal of. I’ve stood and looked at it pretty often. It reminded me of some one the first day I set eyes on it; but it was quite a time before I made up my mind who it was. It used to drive me half dotty trying to think it out.”

“Which one was it?” asked Strangeways.

“We’re coming to it. I want to see if it reminds you of any one. And I want you to see it sudden.” “It’s got to be sudden,” he had said to the duke. “If it’s going to pan out, I believe it’s got to be sudden.” “That’s why I had the rest of ’em left dim. I told Pearson to leave a lamp I could turn up quick,” he said to Strangeways.

The lamp was on a table near by and was shaded by a screen. He took it from the shadow and lifted it suddenly, so that its full gleam fell upon the portrait of the handsome youth with the lace collar and the dark, drooping eyes. It was done in a second, with a dramatically unexpected swiftness. His heart jumped up and down.

“Who’s that?” he demanded, with abruptness so sharp-pitched that the gallery echoed with the sound. “Who’s that?”

He heard a hard, quick gasp, a sound which was momentarily a little horrible, as if the man’s soul was being jerked out of his body’s depths.

“Who is he?” he cried again. “Tell me.”

After the gasp, Strangeways stood still and stared. His eyes were glued to the canvas, drops of sweat came out on his forehead, and he was shuddering. He began to back away with a look of gruesome struggle. He backed and backed, and stared and stared. The gasp came twice again, and then his voice seemed to tear itself loose from some power that was holding it back.

“Th–at!” he cried. “It is–it–is Miles Hugo!”

The last words were almost a shout, and he shook as if he would have fallen. But T. Tembarom put his hand on his shoulder and held him, breathing fast himself. Gee! if it wasn’t like a thing in a play!

“Page at the court of Charles the Second,” he rattled off. “Died of smallpox when he was nineteen. Miles Hugo! Miles Hugo! You hold on to that for all your worth. And hold on to me. I’ll keep you steady. Say it again.”

“Miles Hugo.” The poor majestic-looking fellow almost sobbed it. “Where am I? What is the name of this place?”

“It’s Temple Barholm in the county of Lancashire, England. Hold on to that, too–like thunder!”

Strangeways held the young man’s arm with hands that clutched. He dragged at him. His nightmare held him yet; Tembarom saw it, but flashes of light were blinding him.

“Who”–he pleaded in a shaking and hollow whisper–“are you?”

Here was a stumper! By jings! By jings! And not a minute to think it out. But the answer came all right–all right!

“My name’s Tembarom. T. Tembarom.” And he grinned his splendid grin from sheer sense of relief. “I’m a New Yorker–Brooklyn. I was just forked in here anyhow. Don’t you waste time thinking over me. You sit down here and do your durndest with Miles Hugo.”

CHAPTER XXXIII

Tembarom did not look as though he had slept particularly well, Miss Alicia thought, when they met the next morning; but when she asked him whether he had been disappointed in his last night’s experiment, he answered that he had not. The experiment had come out all right, but Strangeways had been a good deal worked up, and had not been able to sleep until daylight. Sir Ormsby Galloway was to arrive in the afternoon, and he’d probably give him some- thing quieting. Had the coming downstairs seemed to help him to recall anything? Miss Alicia naturally inquired. Tembarom thought it had. He drove to Stone Hover and spent the morning with the duke; he even lunched with him. He returned in time to receive Sir Ormsby Galloway, however, and until that great personage left, they were together in Mr. Strangeways’ rooms.

“I guess I shall get him up to London to the place where Sir Ormsby wants him,” he said rather nervously, after dinner. “I’m not going to miss any chances. If he’ll go, I can get him away quietly some time when I can fix it so there’s no one about to worry him.”

She felt that he had no inclination to go much into detail. He had never had the habit of entering into the details connected with his strange charge. She believed it was because he felt the subject too abnormal not to seem a little awesome to her sympathetic timidity. She did not ask questions because she was afraid she could not ask them intelligently. In fact, the knowledge that this unknown man was living through his struggle with his lost past in the remote rooms of the west wing, almost as though he were a secret prisoner, did seem a little awesome when one awoke in the middle of the dark night and thought of it.

During the passage of the next few weeks, Tembarom went up to London several times. Once he seemed called there suddenly, as it was only during dinner that he told her he was going to take a late train, and should leave the house after she had gone to bed. She felt as though something important must have happened, and hoped it was nothing disturbing.

When he had said that Captain Palliser would return to visit them, her private impression, despite his laugh, had been that it must surely be some time before this would occur. But a little more than three weeks later he appeared, preceded only half an hour by a telegram asking whether he might not spend a night with them on his way farther north. He could not at all understand why the telegram, which he said he had sent the day before, had been delayed.

A certain fatigued haggardness in his countenance caused Miss Alicia to ask whether he had been ill, and he admitted that he had at least not been well, as a result of long and too hurried journeys, and the strenuousness of extended and profoundly serious interviews with his capitalist and magnates.

“No man can engineer gigantic schemes to success without feeling the reaction when his load drops from his shoulders,” he remarked.

“You’ve carried it quite through?” inquired Tembarom.

“We have set on foot one of the largest, most substantially capitalized companies in the European business world,” Palliser replied, with the composure which is almost indifference.

“Good!” said Tembarom cheerfully.

He watched his guest a good deal during the day. He was a bad color for a man who had just steered clear of all shoals and reached the highest point of success. He had a haggard eye as well as a haggard face. It was a terrified eye when its desperate determination to hide its terrors dropped from it for an instant, as a veil might drop. A certain restlessness was manifest in him, and he talked more than usual. He was going to make a visit in Northumberland to an elderly lady of great possessions. It was to be vaguely gathered that she was somewhat interested in the great company–the Cedric. She was a remarkable old person who found a certain agreeable excitement in dabbling in stocks. She was rich enough to be in a position to regard it as a sort of game, and he had been able on several occasions to afford her entertainment. He would remain a few days, and spend his time chiefly in telling her the details of the great scheme and the manner in which they were to be developed.

“If she can play with things that way, she’ll be sure to want stock in it,” Tembarom remarked.

“If she does, she must make up her mind quickly,” Palliser smiled, “or she will not be able to get it. It is not easy to lay one’s hands on even now.”

Tembarom thought of certain speculators of entirely insignificant standing of whom he had chanced to see and hear anecdotes in New York. Most of them were youths of obscure origin who sold newspapers or blacked boots, or “swapped” articles the value of which lay in the desire they could excite in other persons to possess them. A popular method known as “bluff” was their most trusted weapon, and even at twelve and fifteen years of age Tembarom had always regarded it as singularly obvious. He always detested “bluff,” whatsoever its disguise, and was rather mystified by its ingenious faith in itself.

“He’s got badly stung,” was his internal comment as he sucked at his pipe and smiled urbanely at Palliser across the room as they sat together. “He’s come here with some sort of deal on that he knows he couldn’t work with any one but just such a fool as he thinks I am. I guess,” he added in composed reflectiveness, “I don’t really know how big a fool I do look.”

Whatsoever the deal was, he would be likely to let it be known in time.

“He’ll get it off his chest if he’s going away to-morrow,” decided Tembarom. “If there’s anything he’s found out, he’ll use it. If it doesn’t pan out as he thinks it will he’ll just float away to his old lady.”

He gave Palliser every chance, talking to him and encouraging him to talk, even asking him to let him look over the prospectus of the new company and explain details to him, as he was going to explain them to the old lady in Northumberland. He opened up avenues; but for a time Palliser made no attempt to stroll down them. His walk would be a stroll, Tembarom knew, being familiar with his methods. His aspect would be that of a man but little concerned. He would be capable of a slightly rude coldness if he felt that concern on his part was in any degree counted as a factor. Tembarom was aware, among other things, that innocent persons would feel that it was incumbent upon them to be very careful in their treatment of him. He seemed to be thinking things over before he decided upon the psychological moment at which he would begin, if he began. When a man had a good deal to lose or to win, Tembarom realized that he would be likely to hold back until he felt something like solid ground under him.

After Miss Alicia had left them for the night, perhaps he felt, as a result of thinking the matter over, that he had reached a foothold of a firmness at least somewhat to be depended upon.

“What a change you have made in that poor woman’s life!” he said, walking to the side-table and helping himself to a brandy and soda. “What a change!”

“It struck me that a change was needed just about the time I dropped in,” answered his host.

“All the same,” suggested Palliser, tolerantly, “you were immensely generous. She wasn’t entitled to expect it, you know.”

“She didn’t expect anything, not a darned thing,” said Tembarom. “That was what hit me.”

Palliser smiled a cold, amiable smile. His slim, neatly fitted person looked a little shrunken and less straight than was its habit, and its slackness suggested itself as being part of the harry and fatigue which made his face and eyes haggard under his pale, smooth hair.

“Do you purpose to provide for the future of all your indigent relatives even to the third and fourth generation, my dear chap?” he inquired.

“I won’t refuse till I’m asked, anyhow,” was the answer.

“Asked!” Palliser repeated. “I’m one of them, you know, and Lady Mallowe is another. There are lots of us, when we come out of our holes. If it’s only a matter of asking, we might all descend on you.”

Tembarom, smiling, wondered whether they hadn’t descended already, and whether the descent had so far been all that they had anticipated.

Palliser strolled down his opened avenue with an incidental air which was entirely creditable to his training of himself. T. Tembarom acknowledged that much.

“You are too generous,” said Palliser. “You are the sort of fellow who will always need all he has, and more. The way you go among the villagers! You think you merely slouch about and keep it quiet, but you don’t. You’ve set an example no other landowner can expect to live up to, or intends to. It’s too lavish. It’s pernicious, dear chap. I have heard all about the cottage you are doing over for Pearson and his bride. You had better invest in the Cedric.”

Tembarom wanted him to go on, if there was anything in it. He made his face look as he knew Palliser hoped it would look when the psychological moment came. Its expression was not a deterrent; in fact, it had a character not unlikely to lead an eager man, or one who was not as wholly experienced as he believed he was, to rush down a steep hill into the sea, after the manner of the swine in the parable.

Heaven knew Palliser did not mean to rush, and was not aware when the rush began; but he had reason to be so much more eager than he professed to be that momentarily he swerved, despite himself, and ceased to be casual.

“It is an enormous opportunity,” he said–“timber lands in Mexico, you know. If you had spent your life in England, you would realize that timber has become a desperate necessity, and that the difficulties which exist in the way of supplying the demand are almost insuperable. These forests are virtually boundless, and the company which controls them–“

“That’s a good spiel!” broke in Tembarom.

It sounded like the crudely artless interruption of a person whose perceptions left much to be desired. T. Tembarom knew what it sounded like. If Palliser lost his temper, he would get over the ground faster, and he wanted him to get over the ground.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” he replied rather stiffly.

“There was a fellow I knew in New York who used to sell type-writers, and he had a thing to say he used to reel off when any one looked like a customer. He used to call it his ‘spiel.'”

Palliser’s quick glance at him asked questions, and his stiffness did not relax itself.

“Is this New York chaff?” he inquired coldly.

“No,” Tembarom said. “You’re not doing it for ten per. He was”

“No, not exactly,” said Palliser. “Neither would you be doing it for ten per if you went into it.” His voice changed. He became slightly haughty. “Perhaps it was a mistake on my part to think you might care to connect yourself with it. You have not, of course, been in the position to comprehend such matters.”

“If I was what I look like, that’d stir me up and make me feel bad,” thought T. Tembarom, with cheerful comprehension of this, at least. “I’d have to rush in and try to prove to him that I was as accustomed to big business as he is, and that it didn’t rattle me. The way to do it that would come most natural would be to show I was ready to buy as big a block of stock as any other fellow.”

But the expression of his face did not change. He only gave a half- awkward sort of laugh.

“I guess I can learn,” he said.

Palliser felt the foothold become firmer. The bounder was interested, but, after a bounder’s fashion, was either nervous or imagined that a show of hesitation looked shrewd. The slight hit made at his inexperience in investment had irritated him and made him feel less cock-sure of himself. A slightly offended manner might be the best weapon to rely upon.

“I thought you might care to have the thing made clear to you,” he continued indifferently. “I meant to explain. You may take the chance or leave it, as you like, of course. That is nothing to me at this stage of the game. But, after all, we are as I said, relatives of a sort, and it is a gigantic opportunity. Suppose we change the subject. Is that the Sunday Earth I see by you on the table?” He leaned forward to take the paper, as though the subject really were dropped; but, after a seemingly nervous suck or two at his pipe, Tembarom came to his assistance. It wouldn’t do to let him quiet down too much.

“I’m no Van Morganbilt,” he said hesitatingly, “but I can see that it’s a big opportunity–for some one else. Let’s have a look over the prospectus again.”

Palliser paused in his unconcerned opening of the copy of the Sunday Earth. His manner somewhat disgustedly implied indecision as to whether it was worth while to allow oneself to be dropped and taken up by turns.

“Do you really mean that?” he asked with a certain chill of voice.

“Yes. I don’t mind trying to catch on to what’s doing in any big scheme.”

Palliser did not lay aside his suggestion of cold semi-reluctance more readily than any man who knew his business would have laid it aside. His manner at the outset was quite perfect. His sole ineptitude lay in his feeling a too great confidence in the exact quality of his companion’s type, as he summed it up. He did not calculate on the variations from all type sometimes provided by circumstances.

He produced his papers without too obvious eagerness. He spread them upon the table, and coolly examined them himself before beginning his explanation. There was more to explain to a foreigner and one unused to investment than there would be to a man who was an Englishman and familiar with the methods of large companies, he said. He went into technicalities, so to speak, and used rapidly and lightly some imposing words and phrases, to which T. Tembarom listened attentively, but without any special air of illumination. He dealt with statistics and the resulting probabilities. He made apparent the existing condition of England’s inability to supply an enormous and unceasing demand for timber. He had acquired divers excellent methods of stating his case to the party of the second part.

“He made me feel as if a fellow had better hold on to a box of matches like grim death, and that the time wasn’t out of sight when you’d have to give fifty-seven dollars and a half for a toothpick,” Tembarom afterwards said to the duke.

What Tembarom was thinking as he listened to him was that he was not getting over the ground with much rapidity, and that it was time something was doing. He had not watched him for weeks without learning divers of his idiosyncrasies.

“If he thought I wanted to know what he thinks I’d a heap rather NOT know, he’d never tell me,” he speculated. “If he gets a bit hot in the collar, he may let it out. Thing is to stir him up. He’s lost his nerve a bit, and he’ll get mad pretty easy.”

He went on smoking and listening, and asking an unenlightened question now and then, in a manner which was as far from being a deterrent as the largely unilluminated expression of his face was.

“Of course money is wanted,” Palliser said at length. “Money is always wanted, and as much when a scheme is a success as when it isn’t. Good names, with a certain character, are wanted. The fact of your inheritance is known everywhere; and the fact that you are an American is a sort of guaranty of shrewdness.”

“Is it?” said T. Tembarom. “Well,” he added slowly, “I guess Americans are pretty good business men.”

Palliser thought that this was evolving upon perfectly natural lines, as he had anticipated it would. The fellow was flattered and pleased. You could always reach an American by implying that he was one of those who specially illustrate enviable national characteristics.

He went on in smooth, casual laudation:

“No American takes hold of a scheme of this sort until he knows jolly well what he’s going to get out of it. You were shrewd enough,” he added significantly, “about Hutchinson’s affair. You `got in on the ground floor’ there. That was New York forethought, by Jove!”

Tembarom shuffled a little in his chair, and grinned a faint, pleased grin.

“I’m a man of the world, my boy–the business world,” Palliser commented, hoping that he concealed his extreme satisfaction. “I know New York, though I haven’t lived there. I’m only hoping to. Your air of ingenuous ignorance is the cleverest thing about you,” which agreeable implication of the fact that he had been privately observant and impressed ought to have fetched the bounder if anything would.

T. Tembarom’s grin was no longer faint, but spread itself. Palliser’s first impression was that he had “fetched” him. But when he answered, though the very crudeness of his words seemed merely the result of his betrayal into utter tactlessness by soothed vanity, there was something–a shade of something– not entirely satisfactory in his face and nasal twang.

“Well, I guess,” he said, “New York DID teach a fellow not to buy a gold brick off every con man that came along.”

Palliser was guilty of a mere ghost of a start. Was there something in it, or was he only the gross, blundering fool he had trusted to his being? He stared at him a moment, and saw that there WAS something under the words and behind his professedly flattered grin–something which must be treated with a high hand.

“What do you mean?” he exclaimed haughtily. “I don’t like your tone. Do you take ME for what you call a `con man’?”

“Good Lord, no!” answered Tembarom; and he looked straight at Palliser and spoke slowly. “You’re a gentleman, and you’re paying me a visit. You could no more try on a game to do me in my own house than–well, than I could TELL you if I’d got on to you if I saw you doing it. You’re a gentleman.”

Palliser glared back into his infuriatingly candid eyes. He was a far cry from being a dullard himself; he was sharp enough to “catch on” to the revelation that the situation was not what he had thought it, the type was more complex than he had dreamed. The chap had been playing a part; he had absolutely been “jollying him along,” after the New York fashion. He became pale with humiliated rage, though he knew his only defense was to control himself and profess not to see through the trick. Until he could use his big lever, he added to himself.

“Oh, I see,” he commented acridly. “I suppose you don’t realize that your figures of speech are unfortunate.”

“That comes of New York streets, too,” Tembarom answered with deliberation. “But you can’t live as I’ve lived and be dead easy–not DEAD easy.”

Palliser had left his chair, and stood in contemptuous silence.

“You know how a fellow hates to be thought DEAD easy”– Tembarom actually went to the insolent length of saying the words with a touch of cheerful confidingness–“when he’s NOT. And I’m not. Have another drink.”

There was a pause. Palliser began to see, or thought he began to see, where he stood. He had come to Temple Barholm because he had been driven into a corner and had a dangerous fight before him. In anticipation of it he had been following a clue for some time, though at the outset it had been one of incredible slightness. Only his absolute faith in his theory that every man had something to gain or lose, which he concealed discreetly, had led him to it. He held a card too valuable to be used at the beginning of a game. Its power might have lasted a long time, and proved an influence without limit. He forbore any mental reference to blackmail; the word was absurd. One used what fell into one’s hands. If Tembarom had followed his lead with any degree of docility, he would have felt it wiser to save his ammunition until further pressure was necessary. But behind his ridiculous rawness, his foolish jocularity, and his professedly candid good humor, had been hidden the Yankee trickster who was fool enough to think he could play his game through. Well, he could not.

During the few moments’ pause he saw the situation as by a photographic flashlight. He leaned over the table and supplied himself with a fresh brandy and soda from the tray of siphons and decanters. He gave himself time to take the glass up in his hand.

“No,” he answered, “you are not `dead easy.’ That’s why I am going to broach another subject to you.”

Tembarom was refilling his pipe.

“Go ahead,” he said.

“Who, by the way, is Mr. Strangeways?”

He was deliberate and entirely unemotional. So was T. Tembarom when, with match applied to his tobacco, he replied between puffs as he lighted it:

“You can search me. You can search him, too, for that matter. He doesn’t know who he is himself.”

“Bad luck for him!” remarked Palliser, and allowed a slight pause again. After it he added, “Did it ever strike you it might be good luck for somebody else?”

“Somebody else?” Tembarom puffed more slowly, perhaps because his pipe was lighted.

Palliser took some brandy in his soda.

“There are men, you know,” he suggested, “who can be spared by their relatives. I have some myself, by Jove!” he added with a laugh. “You keep him rather dark, don’t you?”

“He doesn’t like to see people.”

“Does he object to people seeing him? I saw him once myself.”

“When you threw the gravel at his window?”

Palliser stared contemptuously.

“What are you talking about? I did not throw stones at his window,” he lied. “I’m not a school-boy.”

“That’s so,” Tembarom admitted.

“I saw him, nevertheless. And I can tell you he gave me rather a start.”

“Why?”

Palliser half laughed again. He did not mean to go too quickly; he would let the thing get on Tembarom’s nerves gradually.

“Well, I’m hanged if I didn’t take him for a man who is dead.”

“Enough to give any fellow a jolt,” Tembarom admitted again.

“It gave me a `jolt.’ Good word, that. But it would give you a bigger one, my dear fellow, if he was the man he looked like.”

“Why?” Tembarom asked laconically.

“He looked like Jem Temple Barholm.”

He saw Tembarom start. There could be no denying it.

“You thought that? Honest?” he said sharply, as if for a moment he had lost his head. “You thought that?”

“Don’t be nervous. Perhaps I couldn’t have sworn to it. I did not see him very close.”

T. Tembarom puffed rapidly at his pipe, and only, ejaculated:

“Oh!”

“Of course he’s dead. If he wasn’t,”–with a shrug of his shoulders,– “Lady Joan Fayre would be Lady Joan Temple Barholm, and the pair would be bringing up an interesting family here.” He looked about the room, and then, as if suddenly recalling the fact, added, “By George! you’d be selling newspapers, or making them–which was it?–in New York!”

It was by no means unpleasing to see that he had made his hit there. T. Tembarom swung about and walked across the room with a suddenly perturbed expression.

“Say,” he put it to him, coming back, “are you in earnest, or are you just saying it to give me a jolt?”

Palliser studied him. The American sharpness was not always so keen as it sometimes seemed. His face would have betrayed his uneasiness to the dullest onlooker.

“Have you any objection to my seeing him in his own room?” Palliser inquired.

“It does him harm to see people,” Tembarom said, with nervous brusqueness. “It worries him.”

Palliser smiled a quiet but far from agreeable smile. He enjoyed what he put into it.

“Quite so; best to keep him quiet,” he returned. “Do you know what my advice would be? Put him in a comfortable sanatorium. A lot of stupid investigations would end in nothing, of course, but they’d be a frightful bore.”

He thought it extraordinarily stupid in T. Tembarom to come nearer to him with an anxious eagerness entirely unconcealed, if he really knew what he was doing.

“Are you sure that if you saw him close you’d KNOW, so that you could swear to him?” he demanded.

“You’re extremely nervous, aren’t you?” Palliser watched him with smiling coolness. “Of course Jem Temple Barholm is dead; but I’ve no doubt that if I saw this man of yours, I could swear he had remained dead–if I were asked.”

“If you knew him well, you could make me sure. You could swear one way or another. I want to be SURE,” said Tembarom.

“So should I in your place; couldn’t be too sure. Well, since you ask me, I COULD swear. I knew him well enough. He was one of my most intimate enemies. What do you say to letting me see him?”

“I would if I could,” Tembarom replied, as if thinking it over. “I would if I could.”

Palliser treated him to the far from pleasing smile again.

“But it’s quite impossible at present?” he suggested. “Excitement is not good for him, and all that sort of thing. You want time to think it over.”

Tembarom’s slowly uttered answer, spoken as if he were still considering the matter, was far from being the one he had expected.

“I want time; but that’s not the reason you can’t see him right now. You can’t see him because he’s not here. He’s gone.”

Then it was Palliser who started, taken totally unaware in a manner which disgusted him altogether. He had to pull himself up.

“He’s gone!” he repeated. “You are quicker than I thought. You’ve got him safely away, have you? Well, I told you a comfortable sanatorium would be a good idea.”

“Yes, you did.” T. Tembarom hesitated, seeming to be thinking it over again. “That’s so.” He laid his pipe aside because it had gone out.

He suddenly sat down at the table, putting his elbows on it and his face in his hands, with a harried effect of wanting to think it over in a sort of withdrawal from his immediate surroundings. This was as it should be. His Yankee readiness had deserted him altogether.

“By Jove! you are nervous!” Palliser commented. “It’s not surprising, though. I can sympathize with you.” With a markedly casual air he himself sat down and drew his documents toward him. “Let us talk of something else,” he said. He preferred to be casual and incidental, if he were allowed. It was always better to suggest things and let them sink in until people saw the advantage of considering them and you. To manage a business matter without open argument or too frank a display of weapons was at once more comfortable and in better taste.

“You are making a great mistake in not going into this,” he suggested amiably. “You could go in now as you went into Hutchinson’s affair, `on the ground floor.’ That’s a good enough phrase, too. Twenty thousand pounds would make you a million. You Americans understand nothing less than millions.”

But T. Tembarom did not take him up. He muttered in a worried way from behind his shading hands, “We’ll talk about that later.”

“Why not talk about it now, before anything can interfere?” Palliser persisted politely, almost gently.

Tembarom sprang up, restless and excited. He had plainly been planning fast in his temporary seclusion.

“I’m thinking of what you said about Lady Joan,” he burst forth. “Say, she’s gone through all this Jem Temple Barholm thing once; it about half killed her. If any one raised false hopes for her, she’d go through it all again. Once is enough for any woman.”

His effect at professing heat and strong feeling made a spark of amusement show itself in Palliser’s eye. It struck him as being peculiarly American in its affectation of sentiment and chivalry.

“I see,” he said. “It’s Lady Joan you’re disturbed about. You want to spare her another shock, I see. You are a considerate fellow, as well as a man of business.”

“I don’t want her to begin to hope if–“

“Very good taste on your part.” Palliser’s polite approval was admirable, but he tapped lightly on the paper after expressing it. “I don’t want to seem to press you about this, but don’t you feel inclined to consider it? I can assure you that an investment of this sort would be a good thing to depend on if the unexpected happened. If you gave me your check now, it would be Cedric stock to-morrow, and quite safe. Suppose you–“

“I–I don’t believe you were right–about what you thought.” The sharp- featured face was changing from pale to red. “You’d have to be able to swear to it, anyhow, and I don’t believe you can.” He looked at Palliser in eager and anxious uncertainty. “If you could,” he dragged out , “I shouldn’t have a check-book. Where would you be then?”

“I should be in comfortable circumstances, dear chap, and so would you if you gave me the money to-night, while you possess a check-book. It would be only a sort of temporary loan in any case, whatever turned up. The investment would quadruple itself. But there is no time to be lost. Understand that.”

T. Tembarom broke out into a sort of boyish resentment.

“I don’t believe he did look like him, anyhow,” he cried. “I believe it’s all a bluff.” His crude-sounding young swagger had a touch of final desperation in it as he turned on Palliser. “I’m dead sure it’s a bluff. What a fool I was not to think of that! You want to bluff me into going into this Cedric thing. You could no more swear he was like him than –than I could.”

The outright, presumptuous, bold stripping bare of his phrases infuriated Palliser too suddenly and too much. He stepped up to him and looked into his eyes.

“Bluff you, you young bounder!” he flung out at him. “You’re losing your head. You’re not in New York streets here. You are talking to a gentleman. No,” he said furiously, “I couldn’t swear that he was like him, but what I can swear in any court of justice is that the man I saw at the window was Jem Temple Barholm, and no other man on earth.”

When he had said it, he saw the astonishing dolt change his expression utterly again, as if in a flash. He stood up, putting his hands in his pockets. His face changed, his voice changed.

“Fine!” he said. “First-rate! That’s what I wanted to get on to.”

CHAPTER XXXIV

After this climax the interview was not so long as it was interesting. Two men as far apart as the poles, as remote from each other in mind and body, in training and education or lack of it, in desires and intentions, in points of view and trend of being, as nature and circumstances could make them, talked in a language foreign to each other of a wildly strange thing. Palliser’s arguments and points of aspect were less unknown to T. Tembarom than his own were to Palliser. He had seen something very like them before, though they had developed in different surroundings and had been differently expressed. The colloquialism “You’re not doing that for your health” can be made to cover much ground in the way of the stripping bare of motives for action. This was what, in excellent and well-chosen English, Captain Palliser frankly said to his host. Of nothing which T. Tembarom said to him in his own statement did he believe one word or syllable. The statement in question was not long or detailed. It was, of course, Palliser saw, a ridiculously impudent flinging together of a farrago of nonsense, transparent in its effort beyond belief. Before he had listened five minutes with the distinctly “nasty” smile, he burst out laughing.

“That is a good `spiel,’ my dear chap,” he said. “It’s as good a `spiel’ as your typewriter friend used to rattle off when he thought he saw a customer; but I’m not a customer.”

Tembarom looked at him interestedly for about ten seconds. His hands were thrust into his trousers pockets, as was his almost invariable custom. Absorption and speculation, even emotion and excitement, were usually expressed in this unconventional manner.

“You don’t believe a darned word of it,” was his sole observation.

“Not a darned word,” Palliser smiled. “You are trying a `bluff,’ which doesn’t do credit to your usual sharpness. It’s a bluff that is actually silly. It makes you look like an ass.”

“Well, it’s true,” said Tembarom; “it’s true.”

Palliser laughed again.

“I only said it made you look like an ass,” he remarked. “I don’t profess to understand you altogether, because you are a new species. Your combination of ignorance and sharpness isn’t easy to calculate on. But there is one thing I have found out, and that is, that when you want to play a particular sharp trick you are willing to let people take you for a fool. I’ll own you’ve deceived me once or twice, even when I suspected you. I’ve heard that’s one of the most successful methods used in the American business world. That’s why I only say you look like an ass. You are an ass in some respects; but you are letting yourself look like one now for some shrewd end. You either think you’ll slip out of danger by it when I make this discovery public, or you think you’ll somehow trick me into keeping my mouth shut.”

“I needn’t trick you into keeping your mouth shut,” Tembarom suggested. “There’s a straightway to do that, ain’t there?” And he indelicately waved his hand toward the documents pertaining to the Cedric Company.

It was stupid as well as gross, in his hearer’s opinion. If he had known what was good for him he would have been clever enough to ignore the practical presentation of his case made half an hour or so earlier.

“No, there is not,” Palliser replied, with serene mendacity. “No suggestion of that sort has been made. My business proposition was given out on an entirely different basis. You, of course, choose to put your personal construction upon it.”

“Gee whiz!” ejaculated T. Tembarom. “I was ‘way off, wasn’t I?”

“I told you that professing to be an ass wouldn’t be good enough in this case. Don’t go on with it,” said Palliser, sharply.

“You’re throwing bouquets. Let a fellow be natural,” said Tembarom.

“That is bluff, too,” Palliser replied more sharply still. “I am not taken in by it, bold as it is. Ever since you came here, you have been playing this game. It was your fool’s grin and guffaw and pretense of good nature that first made me suspect you of having something up your sleeve. You were too unembarrassed and candid.”

“So you began to look out,” Tembarom said, considering him curiously, “just because of that.” Then suddenly he laughed outright, the fool’s guffaw.

It somehow gave Palliser a sort of puzzled shock. It was so hearty that it remotely suggested that he appeared more secure than seemed possible. He tried to reply to him with a languid contempt of manner.

“You think you have some tremendously sharp `deal’ in your hand,” he said, “but you had better remember you are in England where facts are like sledge-hammers. You can’t dodge from under them as you can in America. I dare say you won’t answer me, but I should like to ask you what you propose to do.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do any more than you do,” was the unilluminating answer. “I don’t mind telling you that.”

“And what do you think he will do?”

“I’ve got to wait till I find out. I’m doing it. That was what I told you. What are you going to do?” he added casually.

“I’m going to Lincoln’s Inn Fields to have an interview with Palford & Grimby.”

“That’s a good enough move,” commented Tembarom, “if you think you can prove what you say. You’ve got to prove things, you know. I couldn’t, so I lay low and waited, just like I told you.”

“Of course, of course,” Palliser himself almost grinned in his derision. “You have only been waiting.”

“When you’ve got to prove a thing, and haven’t much to go on, you’ve got to wait,” said T. Tembarom–“to wait and keep your mouth shut, whatever happens, and to let yourself be taken for a fool or a horse- thief isn’t as gilt-edged a job as it seems. But proof’s what it’s best to have before you ring up the curtain. You’d have to have it yourself. So would Palford & Grimby before it’d be stone-cold safe to rush things and accuse a man of a penitentiary offense.”

He took his unconventional half-seat on the edge of the table, with one foot on the floor and the other one lightly swinging.

“Palford & Grimby are clever old ducks, and they know that much. Thing they’d know best would be that to set a raft of lies going about a man who’s got money enough to defend himself, and to make them pay big damages for it afterward, would be pretty bum business. I guess they know all about what proof stands for. They may have to wait; so may you, same as I have.”

Palliser realized that he was in the position of a man striking at an adversary whose construction was of India-rubber. He struck home, but left no bruise and drew no blood, which was an irritating thing. He lost his temper.

“Proof!” he jerked out. “There will be proof enough, and when it is made public, you will not control the money you threaten to use.”

“When you get proof, just you let me hear about it,” T. Tembarom said. “And all the money I’m threatening on shall go where it belongs, and I’ll go back to New York and sell papers if I have to. It won’t come as hard as you think.”

The flippant insolence with which he brazened out his pretense that he had not lied, that his ridiculous romance was actual and simple truth, suggested dangerous readiness of device and secret knowledge of power which could be adroitly used.

“You are merely marking time,” said Palliser, rising, with cold determination to be juggled with no longer. “You have hidden him away where you think you can do as you please with a man who is an invalid. That is your dodge. You’ve got him hidden somewhere, and his friends had better get at him before it is too late.”

“I’m not answering questions this evening, and I’m not giving addresses, though there are no witnesses to take them down. If he’s hidden away, he’s where he won’t be disturbed,” was T. Tembarom’s rejoinder. “You may lay your bottom dollar on that.”

Palliser walked toward the door without speaking. He had almost reached it when he whirled about involuntarily, arrested by a shout of laughter.

“Say,” announced Tembarom, “you mayn’t know it, but this lay-out would make a first-rate turn in a vaudeville. You think I’m lying, I look like I’m lying, I guess every word I say sounds like I’m lying. To a fellow like you, I guess it couldn’t help but sound that way. And I’m not lying. That’s where the joke comes in. I’m not lying. I’ve not told you all I know because it’s none of your business and wouldn’t help; but what I have told you is the stone-cold truth.”

He was keeping it up to the very end with a desperate determination not to let go his hold of his pose until he had made his private shrewd deal, whatsoever it was. At least, so it struck Palliser, who merely said:

“I ‘m leaving the house by the first train to-morrow morning.” He fixed a cold gray eye on the fool’s grin.

“Six forty-five,” said T. Tembarom. “I’ll order the carriage. I might go up myself.”

The door closed.

Tembarom was looking cheerful enough when he went into his bedroom. He had become used to its size and had learned to feel that it was a good sort of place. It had the hall bedroom at Mrs. Bowse’s boarding-house “beaten to a frazzle.” There was about everything in it that any man could hatch up an idea he’d like to have. He had slept luxuriously on the splendid carved bed through long nights, he had lain awake and thought out things on it, he had lain and watched the fire-light flickering on the ceiling, as he thought about Ann and made plans, and “fixed up” the Harlem flat which could be run on fifteen per. He had picked out the pieces of furniture from the Sunday Earth advertisement sheet, and had set them in their places. He always saw the six-dollar mahogany-stained table set for supper, with Ann at one end and himself at the other. He had grown actually fond of the old room because of the silence and comfort of it, which tended to give reality to his dreams. Pearson, who had ceased to look anxious, and who had acquired fresh accomplishments in the form of an entirely new set of duties, was waiting, and handed him a telegram.

“This just arrived, sir,” he explained. “James brought it here because he thought you had come up, and I didn’t send it down because I heard you on the stairs.”

“That’s right. Thank you, Pearson,” his master said.

He tore the yellow envelop, and read the message. In a moment Pearson knew it was not an ordinary message, and therefore remained more than ordinarily impassive of expression. He did not even ask of himself what it might convey.

Mr. Temple Barholm stood still a few seconds, with the look of a man who must think and think rapidly.

“What is the next train to London, Pearson?” he asked.

“There is one at twelve thirty-six, sir,” he answered. “It’s the last till six in the morning. You have to change at Crowley.”

“You’re always ready, Pearson,” returned Mr. Temple Barholm. “I want to get that train.”

Pearson was always ready. Before the last word was quite spoken he had turned and opened the bedroom door.

“I’ll order the dog-cart; that’s quickest, sir,” he said. He was out of the room and in again almost immediately. Then he was at the wardrobe and taking out what Mr. Temple Barholm called his “grip,” but what Pearson knew as a Gladstone bag. It was always kept ready packed for unexpected emergencies of travel.

Mr. Temple Barholm sat at the table and drew pen and paper toward him. He looked excited; he looked more troubled than Pearson had seen him look before.

“The wire’s from Sir Ormsby Galloway, Pearson,” he said.

“It’s about Mr. Strangeways. He’s done what I used to be always watching out against: he’s disappeared.”

“Disappeared, sir!” cried Pearson, and almost dropped the Gladstone bag. “I beg pardon, sir. I know there’s no time to lose.” He steadied the bag and went on with his task without even turning round.

His master was in some difficulty. He began to write, and after dashing off a few words, stopped, and tore them up.

“No,” he muttered, “that won’t do. There’s no time to explain.” Then he began again, but tore up his next lines also.

“That says too much and not enough. It’d frighten the life out of her.”

He wrote again, and ended by folding the sheet and putting it into an envelop.

“This is a message for Miss Alicia,” he said to Pearson. “Give it to her in the morning. I don’t want her to worry because I had to go in a hurry. Tell her everything’s going to be all right; but you needn’t mention that anything’s happened to Mr. Strangeways.”

“Yes, sir,” answered Pearson.

Mr. Temple Barholm was already moving about the room, doing odd things for himself rapidly, and he went on speaking.

“I want you and Rose to know,” he said, “that whatever happens, you are both fixed all right–both of you. I’ve seen to that.”

“Thank you, sir,” Pearson faltered, made uneasy by something new in his tone. “You said whatever happened, sir–“

“Whatever old thing happens,” his master took him up.

“Not to you, sir. Oh, I hope, sir, that nothing–“

Mr. Temple Barholm put a cheerful hand on his shoulder.

“Nothing’s going to happen that’ll hurt any one. Things may change, that’s all. You and Rose are all right, Miss Alicia’s all right, I’m all right. Come along. Got to catch that train.”‘

In this manner he took his departure.

Miss Alicia had from necessity acquired the habit of early rising at Rowcroft vicarage, and as the next morning was bright, she was clipping roses on a terrace before breakfast when Pearson brought her the note.

“Mr. Temple Barholm received a telegram from London last night, ma’am,” he explained, “and he was obliged to take the midnight train. He hadn’t time to do any more than leave a few lines for you, but he asked me to tell you that nothing disturbing had occurred. He specially mentioned that everything was all right.”

“But how very sudden!” exclaimed Miss Alicia, opening her note and beginning to read it. Plainly it had been written hurriedly indeed. It read as though he had been in such haste that he hadn’t had time to be clear.

Dear little Miss Alicia:

I’ve got to light out of here as quick as I can make it. I can’t even stop to tell you why. There’s just one thing– don’t get rattled, Miss Alicia. Whatever any one says or does, just don’t let yourself get rattled.

Yours affectionately,

T. TEMBAROM.

“Pearson,” Miss Alicia exclaimed, again looking up, “are you sure everything is all right?”

“That was what he said, ma’am. `All right,’ ma’am.”

“Thank you, Pearson. I am glad to hear it.”

She walked to and fro in the sunshine, reading the note and rereading it.

“Of course if he said it was all right, it was all right,” she murmured. “It is only the phrasing that makes me slightly nervous. Why should he ask me not to get rattled?” The term was by this time as familiar to her as any in Dr. Johnson’s dictionary. “Of course he knows I do get rattled much too easily; but why should I be in danger of getting rattled now if nothing has happened?” She gave a very small start as she remembered something. “Could it be that Captain Palliser- – But how could he? Though I do not like Captain Palliser.”

Captain Palliser, her distaste for whom at the moment quite agitated her, was this morning an early riser also, and as she turned in her walk she found him coming toward her.

“I find I am obliged to take an early train to London this morning,” he said, after their exchange of greetings. “It is quite unexpected. I spoke to Mr. Temple Barholm about it last night.”

Perhaps the unexpectedness, perhaps a certain suggestion of coincidence, caused Miss Alicia’s side ringlets to appear momentarily tremulous.

“Then perhaps we had better go in to breakfast at once,” she said.

“Is Mr. Temple Barholm down?” he inquired as they seated themselves at the breakfast-table.

“He is not here,” she answered. “He, too, was called away unexpectedly. He went to London by the midnight train.”

She had never been so aware of her unchristian lack of liking for Captain Palliser as she was when he paused a moment before he made any comment. His pause was as marked as a start, and the smile he indulged in was, she felt, most singularly disagreeable. It was a smile of the order which conceals an unpleasant explanation of itself.

“Oh,” he remarked, “he has gone first, has he?”

“Yes,” she answered, pouring out his coffee for him. “He evidently had business of importance.”

They were quite alone, and she was not one of the women one need disturb oneself about. She had been browbeaten into hypersensitive timidity early in life, and did not know how to resent cleverly managed polite bullying. She would always feel herself at fault if she was tempted to criticize any one. She was innocent and nervous enough to betray herself to any extent, because she would feel it rude to refuse to answer questions, howsoever far they exceeded the limits of polite curiosity. He had learned a good deal from her in the past. Why not try what could be startled out of her now? Thus Captain Palliser said:

“I dare say you feel a little anxious at such an extraordinarily sudden departure,” he suggested amiably. “Bolting off in the middle of the night was sudden, if he did not explain himself.”

“He had no time to explain,” she answered.

“That makes it appear all the more sudden. But no doubt he left you a message. I saw you were reading a note when I joined you on the terrace.”

Lightly casual as he chose to make the words sound, they were an audacity he would have known better than to allow himself with any one but a timid early-Victorian spinster whose politeness was hypersensitive in its quality.

“He particularly desired that I should not be anxious,” she said. “He is always considerate.”

“He would, of course, have explained everything if he had not been so hurried?”

“Of course, if it had been necessary,” answered Miss Alicia, nervously sipping her tea.

“Naturally,” said Captain Palliser. “His note no doubt mentioned that he went away on business connected with his friend Mr. Strangeways?”

There was no question of the fact that she was startled.

“He had not time enough,” she said. “He could only write a few lines. Mr. Strangeways?”

“We had a long talk about him last night. He told me a remarkable story,” Captain Palliser went on. “I suppose you are quite familiar with all the details of it?”

“I know how he found him in New York, and I know how generous he has been to him.”

“Have you been told nothing more?”

“There was nothing more to tell. If there was anything, I am sure he had some good reason for not telling me,” said Miss Alicia, loyally. “His reasons are always good.”

Palliser’s air of losing a shade or so of discretion as a result of astonishment was really well done.

“Do you mean to say that he has not even hinted that ever since he arrived at Temple Barholm he has strongly suspected Strangeways’ identity–that he has even known who he is?” he exclaimed.

Miss Alicia’s small hands clung to the table-cloth.

“He has not known at all. He has been most anxious to discover. He has used every endeavor,” she brought out with some difficulty.

“You say he has been trying to find out?” Palliser interposed.

“He has been more than anxious,” she protested. “He has been to London again and again; he has gone to great expense; he has even seen people from Scotland Yard. I have sometimes almost thought he was assuming more responsibility than was just to himself. In the case of a relative or an old friend, but for an entire stranger–Oh, really, I ought not to seem to criticize. I do not presume to criticize his wonderful generosity and determination and goodness. No one should presume to question him.”

“If he knows that you feel like this–” Palliser began.

“He knows all that I feel,” Miss Alicia took him up with a pretty, rising spirit. “He knows that I am full of unspeakable gratitude to him for his beautiful kindness to me; he knows that I admire and respect and love him in a way I could never express, and that I would do anything in the world he could wish me to do.”

“Naturally,” said Captain Palliser. “I was only about to express my surprise that since he is aware of all this he has not told you who he has proved Strangeways to be. It is a little odd, you know.”

“I think “–Miss Alicia was even gently firm in her reply –“that you are a little mistaken in believing Mr. Temple Barholm has proved Mr. Strangeways to be anybody. When he has proof, he will no doubt think proper to tell me about it. Until then I should prefer–“

Palliser laughed as he finished her sentence.

“Not to know. I was not going to betray him, Miss Alicia. He evidently has one of his excellent reasons for keeping things to himself. I may mention, however, that it is not so much he who has proof as I myself.”

“You!” How could she help quite starting in her seat when his gray eyes fixed themselves on her with such a touch of finely amused malice?

“I offered him the proof last night, and it rather upset him,” he said. “He thought no one knew but himself, and he was not inclined to tell the world. He was upset because I said I had seen the man and could swear to his identity. That was why he went away so hurriedly. He no doubt went to see Strangeways and talk it over.”

“See Mr. Strangeways? But Mr. Strangeways–” Miss Alicia rose and rang the bell.

“Tell Pearson I wish to see him at once,” she said to the footman.

Palliser took in her mood without comment. He had no objection to being present when she made inquiries of Pearson.

“I hear the wheels of the dog-cart,” he remarked. “You see, I must catch my train.”

Pearson stood at the door.

“Is not Mr. Strangeways in his room, Pearson?” Miss Alicia asked.

“Mr. Temple Barholm took him to London when he last went, ma’am,” answered Pearson. “You remember he went at night. The doctor thought it best.”

“He did not tell you that, either?” said Palliser, casually.

“The dog-cart is at the door, sir,” announced Pearson.

Miss Alicia’s hand was unsteady when the departing guest took it.

“Don’t be disturbed,” he said considerately, “but a most singular thing has happened. When I asked so many questions about Temple Barholm’s Man with the Iron Mask I asked them for curious reasons. That must be my apology. You will hear all about it later, probably from Palford & Grimby.”

When he had left the room Miss Alicia stood upon the hearth- rug as the dog-cart drove away, and she was pale. Her simple and easily disturbed brain was in a whirl. She could scarcely remember what she had heard, and could not in the least comprehend what it had seemed intended to imply, except that there had been concealed in the suggestions some disparagement of her best beloved.

Singular as it was that Pearson should return without being summoned, when she turned and found that he mysteriously stood inside the threshold again, as if she had called him, she felt a great sense of relief.

“Pearson,” she faltered, “I am rather upset by certain things which Captain Palliser has said. I am afraid I do not understand.”

She looked at him helplessly, not knowing what more to say. She wished extremely that she could think of something definite.

The masterly finish of Pearson’s reply lay in its neatly restrained hint of unobtrusively perceptive sympathy.

“Yes, Miss. I was afraid so. Which is why I took the liberty of stepping into the room again. I myself do not understand, but of course I do not expect to. If I may be so bold as to say it, Miss, whatever we don’t understand, we both understand Mr. Temple Barholm. My instructions were to remind you, Miss, that everything would be all right.”

Miss Alicia took up her letter from the table where she had laid it down.

“Thank you, Pearson,” she said, her forehead beginning to clear itself a little. “Of course, of course. I ought not to– He told me not to– get rattled,” she added with plaintive ingenuousness, “and I ought not to, above all things.”

“Yes, Miss. It is most important that you should not.”

CHAPTER XXXV

The story of the adventures, experiences, and journeyings of Mr. Joseph Hutchinson, his daughter, and the invention, if related in detail, would prove reading of interest; but as this is merely a study of the manner in which the untrained characteristics and varied limitations of one man adjusted or failed to adjust themselves to incongruous surroundings and totally unprepared-for circumstances, such details, whatsoever their potential picturesqueness, can be touched upon but lightly. No new idea of value to the world of practical requirements is presented to the public at large without the waking of many sleeping dogs, and the stirring of many snapping fish, floating with open ears and eyes in many pools. An uneducated, blustering, obstinate man of one idea, having resentfully borne discouragement and wounded egotism for years, and suddenly confronting immense promise of success, is not unlikely to be prey easily harpooned. Joseph Hutchinson’s rebound from despair to high and well- founded hope made of him exactly what such a man is always made by such rebound. The testimony to his genius and judgment which acknowledgment of the value of his work implied was naturally, in his opinion, only a proper tribute which the public had been a bull-headed fool not to lay at his feet years before. So much time lost, and so much money for it, as well as for him, and served ’em all damned well right, he said. If Temple Barholm hadn’t come into his money, and hadn’t had more sense than the rest of them, where would they all have been? Perhaps they’d never have had the benefit of the thing he’d been telling them about for years. He prided himself immensely on the possession of a business shrewdness which was an absolute defense against any desire on the part of the iniquitous to overreach him. He believed it to be a peculiarly Lancashire characteristic, and kept it in view constantly.

“Lancashire’s not easy to do,” he would say hilariously, “Them that can do a Lancashire chap has got to look out that they get up early in the morning and don’t go to bed till late.”

Smooth-mannered and astute men of business who knew how to make a man talk were given diffuse and loud-voiced explanations of his methods and long-acknowledged merits and characteristics. His life, his morals, and his training, or rather lack ot it, were laid before them as examples of what a man might work himself up to if “he had it in him.” Education didn’t do it. He had never been to naught but a village school, where he’d picked up precious little but the three R’s. It had to be born in a man. Look at him! His invention promised to bring him in a fortune like a duke’s, if he managed it right and kept his eyes open for sharpers. This company and that company were after him, but Lancashire didn’t snap up things without going into ’em, and under ’em, and through ’em, for the matter of that.

The well-mannered gentlemen of business stimulated him greatly by their appreciative attention. He sometimes lost his head a trifle and almost bullied them, but they did not seem to mind it. Their apparently old- time knowledge of and respect for Lancashire business sagacity seemed invariably a marked thing. Men of genius and powerful character combined with practical shrewdness of outlook they intimated, were of enormous value to the business world. They were to be counted upon as important factors. They could see and deal with both sides of a proposal as those of weaker mind could not.

“That they can,” Hutchinson would admit, rolling about in his chair and thrusting his hands in his pockets. “They’ve got some bottom to stand on.” And he would feel amenable to reason.

Little Ann found her duties and responsibilities increasing daily. Many persons seemed to think it necessary to come and talk business, and father had so much to think of and reason out, so that he could be sure that he didn’t make any mistakes. In a quiet, remote, and darkened corner of her mind, in which were stored all such things as it was well to say little or nothing about, there was discreetly kept for reference the secretly acquired knowledge that father did not know so much about business ways and business people as he thought he did. Mother had learned this somewhat important fact, and had secluded it in her own private mental store-room with much affectionate delicacy.

“Father’s a great man and a good man, Ann love,” she had confided to her, choosing an occasion when her husband was a hundred miles away, “and he IS right-down Lancashire in his clever way of seeing through people that think themselves sharp; but when a man is a genius and noble-minded he sometimes can’t see the right people’s faults and wickedness. He thinks they mean as honest as he does. And there’s times when he may get taken in if some one, perhaps not half as clever as he is, doesn’t look after him. When the invention’s taken up, and everybody’s running after him to try to cheat him out of his rights, if I’m not there, Ann, you must just keep with him and watch every minute. I’ve seen these sharp, tricky ones right-down flinch and quail when there was a nice, quiet-behaved woman in the room, and she just fixed her eye steady and clear-like on them and showed she’d took in every word and was like to remember. You know what I mean, Ann; you’ve got that look in your own eye.”

She had. The various persons who interviewed Mr. Hutchinson became familiar with the fact that he had an unusual intimacy with and affection for his daughter. She was present on all occasions. If she had not been such a quiet and entirely unobtrusive little thing, she might have been an obstacle to freedom of expression. But she seemed a childish, unsophisticated creature, who always had a book with her when she waited in an office, and a trifle of sewing to occupy herself with when she was at home. At first she so obliterated herself that she was scarcely noticed; but in course of time it became observed by some that she was curiously pretty. The face usually bent over her book or work was tinted like a flower, and she had quite magnificent red hair. A stout old financier first remarked her eyes. He found one day that she had quietly laid her book on her lap, and that they were resting upon him like unflinching crystals as he talked to her father. Their serenity made him feel annoyed and uncomfortable. It was a sort of recording serenity. He felt as though she would so clearly remember every word he had said that she would be able to write it down when she went home; and he did not care to have it written down. So he began to wander somewhat in his argument, and did not reach his conclusions.

“I was glad, Father, to see how you managed that gentleman this afternoon,” Little Ann said that night when Hutchinson had settled himself with his pipe after an excellent dinner.

“Eh?” he exclaimed. “Eh?”

“The one,” she exclaimed, “that thought he was so sure he was going to persuade you to sign that paper. I do wonder he could think you’d listen to such a poor offer, and tie up so much. Why, even I could see he was trying to take advantage, and I know nothing in the world about business.”

The financier in question had been a brilliant and laudatory conversationalist, and had so soothed and exhilarated Mr. Hutchinson that such perils had beset him as his most lurid imaginings could never have conceived in his darkest moments of believing that the entire universe had ceased all other occupation to engage in that of defrauding him of his rights and dues. He had been so uplifted by the admiration of his genius so properly exhibited, and the fluency with which his future fortunes had been described, that he had been huffed when the arguments seemed to dwindle away. Little Ann startled him, but it was not he who would show signs of dismay at the totally unexpected expression of adverse opinion. He had got into the habit of always listening, though inadvertently, as it were, to Ann as he had inadvertently listened to her mother.

“Rosenthal?” he said. “Are you talking about him?”

“Yes, I am,” Little Ann answeered, smiling approvingly over her bit of sewing. “Father, I wish you’d try and teach me some of the things you know about business. I’ve learned a little by just listening to you talk; but I should so like to feel as if I could follow you when you argue. I do so enjoy hearing you argue. It’s just an education.”

“Women are not up to much at business,” reflected Hutchinson. “If you’d been a boy, I’d have trained you same as I’ve trained myself. You’re a sharp little thing, Ann, but you’re a woman. Not but what a woman’s the best thing on earth,” he added almost severely in his conviction–“the best thing on earth in her place. I don’t know what I’d ever have done without you, Ann, in the bad times.”

He loved her, blundering old egotist, just as he had loved her mother. Ann always knew it, and her own love for him warmed all the world about them both. She got up and went to him to kiss him, and pat him, and stuff a cushion behind his stout back.

“And now the good times have come,” she said, bestowing on him two or three special little pats which were caresses of her own invention, “and people see what you are and always have been, as they ought to have seen long ago, I don’t want to feel as if I couldn’t keep up with you and understand your plans. Perhaps I’ve got a little bit of your cleverness, and you might teach me to use it in small ways. I’ve got a good memory you know, Father love, and I might recollect things people say and make bits of notes of them to save you trouble. And I can calculate. I once got a copy of Bunyan’s `Pilgrim’s Progress’ for a prize at the village school just for sums.”

The bald but unacknowledged fact that Mr. Hutchinson had never exhibited gifts likely to entitle him to receive a prize for “sums” caused this suggestion to be one of some practical value. When business men talked to him of per cents., and tenth shares or net receipts, and expected him to comprehend their proportions upon the spot without recourse to pencil and paper, he felt himself grow hot and nervous and red, and was secretly terrified lest the party of the second part should detect that he was tossed upon seas of horrible uncertainty. T. Tembarom in the same situation would probably have said, “This is the place where T. T. sits down a while to take breath and count things up on his fingers. I am not a sharp on arithmetic, and I need time–lots of it.”

Mr. Hutchinson’s way was to bluster irritatedly.

“Aye, aye, I see that, of course, plain enough. I see that.” And feel himself breaking into a cold perspiration. “Eh, this English climate is a damp un,” he would add when it became necessary to mop his red forehead somewhat with his big clean handkerchief.

Therefore he found it easy to receive Little Ann’s proposition with favor.

“There’s summat i’ that,” he acknowledged graciously, dropping into Lancashire. “That’s one of the little things a woman can do if she’s sharp at figures. Your mother taught me that much. She always said women ought to look after the bits of things as was too small for a man to bother with.”

“Men have the big things to look after. That’s enough for anybody,” said Little Ann. “And they ought to leave something for women to do. If you’ll just let me keep notes for you and remember things and answer your letters, and just make calculations you’re too busy to attend to, I should feel right-down happy, Father.”

“Eh!” he said relievedly, “tha art like thy mother.”

“That would make me happy if there was nothing else to do it,” said Ann, smoothing his shoulder.

“You’re her girl,” he said, warmed and supported.

“Yes, I’m her girl, and I’m yours. Now, isn’t there some little thing I could begin with? Would you mind telling me if I was right in what I thought you thought about Mr. Rosenthal’s offer?”

“What did you think I thought about it?” He was able to put affectionate condescension into the question.

She went to her work-basket and took out a sheet of paper. She came back and sat cozily on the arm of his chair.

“I had to put it all down when I came home,” she said. “I wanted to make sure I hadn’t forgotten. I do hope I didn’t make mistakes.”

She gave it to him to look at, and as he settled himself down to its careful examination, she kept her blue eyes upon him. She herself did not know that it was a wonderful little document in its neatly jotted down notes of the exact detail most important to his interests.

There were figures, there were calculations of profits, there were records of the gist of his replies, there were things Hutchinson himself could not possibly have fished out of the jumbled rag-bag of his uncertain recollections.

“Did I say that?” he exclaimed once.

“Yes, Father love, and I could see it upset him. I was watching his face because it wasn’t a face I took to.”

Joseph Hutchinson began to chuckle–the chuckle of a relieved and gratified stout man.

“Tha kept thy eyes open, Little Ann,” he said. “And the way tha’s put it down is a credit to thee. And I’ll lay a sovereign that tha made no mistakes in what tha thought I was thinking.”

He was a little anxious to hear what it had been. The memorandum had brought him up with a slight shock, because it showed him that he had not remembered certain points, and had passed over others which were of dangerous importance. Ann slipped her warm arm about his neck, as she nearly always did when she sat on the arm of his chair and talked things over with him. She had never thought, in fact she was not even aware, that her soft little instincts made her treat him as the big, good, conceited, blundering child nature had created him.

“What I was seeing all the time was the way you were taking in his trick of putting whole lots of things in that didn’t really matter, and leaving out things that did,” she explained. “He kept talking about what the invention would make in England, and how it would make it, and adding up figures and per cents. and royalties until my head was buzzing inside. And when he thought he’d got your mind fixed on England so that you’d almost forget there was any other country to think of, he read out the agreement that said `All rights,’ and he was silly enough to think he could get you to sign it without reading it over and over yourself, and showing it to a clever lawyer that would know that as many tricks can be played by things being left out of a paper as by things being put in.”

Small beads of moisture broke out on the bald part of Joseph Hutchinson’s head. He had been first so flattered and exhilarated by the quoting of large figures, and then so flustrated and embarrassed by his inability to calculate and follow argument, and again so soothed and elated and thrilled by his own importance in the scheme and the honors which his position in certain companies would heap upon him, that an abyss had yawned before him of which he had been wholly unaware. He was not unaware of it now. He was a vainglorious, ignorant man, whose life had been spent in common work done under the supervision of those who knew what he did not know. He had fed himself upon the comforting belief that he had learned all the tricks of any trade. He had been openly boastful of his astuteness and experience, and yet, as Ann’s soft little voice went on, and she praised his cleverness in seeing one point after another, he began to quake within himself before the dawning realization that he had seen none of them, that he had been carried along exactly as Rosenthal had intended that he should be, and that if luck had not intervened, he had been on the brink of signing his name to an agreement that would have implied a score of concessions he would have bellowed like a bull at the thought of making if he had known what he was doing.

“Aye, lass,” he gulped out when he could speak–“aye, lass, tha wert right enow. I’m glad tha wert there and heard it, and saw what I was thinking. I didn’t say much. I let the chap have rope enow to hang himself with. When he comes back I’ll give him a bit o’ my mind as’ll startle him. It was right-down clever of thee to see just what I had i’ my head about all that there gab about things as didn’t matter, an’ the leavin’ out them as did–thinking I wouldn’t notice. Many’s the time I’ve said, `It is na so much what’s put into a contract as what’s left out.’ I’ll warrant tha’st heard me say it thysen.”

“I dare say I have,” answered Ann, “and I dare say that was why it came into my mind.”

“That was it,” he answered. “Thy mother was always tellin’ me of things I’d said that I’d clean forgot myself.”

He was beginning to recover his balance and self-respect. It would have been so like a Lancashire chap to have seen and dealt shrewdly with a business schemer who tried to outwit him that he was gradually convinced that he had thought all that had been suggested, and had comported himself with triumphant though silent astuteness. He even began to rub his hands.

“I’ll show him,” he said, “I’ll send him off with a flea in his ear.”

“If you’ll help me, I’ll study out the things I’ve written down on this paper,” Ann said, “and then I’ll write down for you just the things you make up your mind to say. It will be such a good lesson for me, if you don’t mind, Father. It won’t be much to write it out the way you’ll say it. You know how you always feel that in business the fewer words the better, and that, however much a person deserves it, calling names and showing you’re angry is only wasting time. One of the cleverest things you ever thought was that a thief doesn’t mind being called one if he’s got what he wanted out of you; he’ll only laugh to see you in a rage when you can’t help yourself. And if he hasn’t got what he wanted, it’s only waste of strength to work yourself up. It’s you being what you are that makes you know that temper isn’t business.”

“Well,” said Hutchinson, drawing a long and deep breath, “I was almost hot enough to have forgot that, and I’m glad you’ve reminded me. We’ll go over that paper now, Ann. I’d like to give you your lesson while we’ve got a bit o’ time to ourselves and what I’ve said is fresh in your mind. The trick is always to get at things while they’re fresh in your mind.”

The little daughter with the red hair was present during Rosenthal’s next interview with the owner of the invention. The fellow, he told himself, had been thinking matters over, had perhaps consulted a lawyer; and having had time for reflection, he did not present a mass of mere inflated and blundering vanity as a target for adroit aim. He seemed a trifle sulky, but he did not talk about himself diffusely, and lose his head when he was smoothed the right way. He had a set of curiously concise notes to which he referred, and he stuck to his points with a bulldog obstinacy which was not to be shaken. Something had set him on a new tack. The tricks which could be used only with a totally ignorant and readily flattered and influenced business amateur were no longer in order. This was baffling and irritating.

The worst feature of the situation was that the daughter did not read a book, as had seemed her habit at other times. She sat with a tablet and pencil on her knee, and, still as unobtrusively as ever, jotted down notes.

“Put that down, Ann,” her father said to her more than once. “There’s no objections to having things written down, I suppose?” he put it bluntly to Rosenthal. “I’ve got to have notes made when I’m doing business. Memory’s all well enough, but black and white’s better. No one can go back of black and white. Notes save time.”

There was but one attitude possible. No man of business could resent the recording of his considered words, but the tablet and pencil and the quietly bent red head were extraordinary obstacles to the fluidity of eloquence. Rosenthal found his arguments less ready and his methods modifying themselves. The outlook narrowed itself. When he returned to his office and talked the situation over with his partner, he sat and bit his nails in restless irritation.

“Ridiculous as it seems, outrageously ridiculous, I’ve an idea,” he said, “I’ve more than an idea that we have to count with the girl.”

“Girl? What girl?”

“Daughter. Well-behaved, quiet bit of a thing, who sits in a corner and listens while she pretends to sew or read. I’m certain of it. She’s taken to making notes now, and Hutchinson’s turned stubborn. You need not laugh, Lewis. She’s in it. We’ve got to count with that girl, little female mouse as she looks.”

This view, which was first taken by Rosenthal and passed on to his partner, was in course of time passed on to others and gradually accepted, sometimes reluctantly and with much private protest, sometimes with amusement. The well-behaved daughter went with Hutchinson wheresoever his affairs called him. She was changeless in the unobtrusiveness of her demeanor, which was always that of a dutiful and obedient young person who attended her parent because he might desire her humble little assistance in small matters.

“She’s my secretary,” Hutchinson began to explain, with a touch of swagger. “I’ve got to have a secretary, and I’d rather trust my private business to my own daughter than to any one else. It’s safe with her.”

It was so safe with her steady demureness that Hutchinson found himself becoming steady himself. The “lessons” he gave to Little Ann, and the notes made as a result, always ostensibly for her own security and instruction, began to form a singularly firm foundation for statement and argument. He began to tell himself that his memory was improving. Facts were no longer jumbled together in his mind. He could better follow a line of logical reasoning. He less often grew red and hot and flustered.

“That’s the thing I’ve said so often–that temper’s got naught to do wi’ business, and only upsets a man when he wants all his wits about him. It’s the truest thing I ever worked out,” he not infrequently congratulated himself. “If a chap can keep his temper, he’ll be like to keep his head and drive his bargain. I see it plainer every day o’ my life.”

CHAPTER XXXVI

It was in the course of the “lessons” that he realized that he had always argued that the best way to do business was to do it face to face with people. To stay in England, and let another chap make your bargains for you in France or Germany or some other outlandish place, where frog-eating foreigners ran loose, was a fool’s trick. He’d said it often enough. “Get your eye on ’em, and let them know you’ve got it on them, and they’d soon find out they were dealing with Lancashire, and not with foreign knaves and nincompoops.” So, when it became necessary to deal with France, Little Ann packed him up neatly, so to speak, and in the role of obedient secretarial companion took him to that country, having for weeks beforehand mentally confronted the endless complications attending the step. She knew, in the first place, what the effect of the French language would be upon his temper: that it would present itself to him as a wall deliberately built by the entire nation as a means of concealing a deep duplicity the sole object of which was the baffling, thwarting, and undoing of Englishmen, from whom it wished to wrest their honest rights. Apoplexy becoming imminent, as a result of his impotent rage during their first few days in Paris, she paid a private visit to a traveler’s agency, and after careful inquiry discovered that it was not impossible to secure the attendance and service of a well-mannered young man who spoke most of the languages employed by most of the inhabitants of the globe. She even found that she might choose from a number of such persons, and she therefore selected with great care.

“One that’s got a good temper, and isn’t easy irritated,” she said to herself, in summing up the aspirants, “but not one that’s easy- tempered because he’s silly. He must have plenty of common sense as well as be willing to do what he’s told.”

When her father discovered that he himself had been considering the desirability of engaging the services of such a person, and had, indeed already, in a way, expressed his intention of sending her to “the agency chap” to look him up, she was greatly relieved.

“I can try to teach him what you’ve taught me, Father,” she said, “and of course he’ll learn just by being with you.”

The assistant engaged was a hungry young student who had for weeks, through ill luck, been endeavoring to return with some courage the gaze of starvation, which had been staring him in the face.

His name was Dudevant, and with desperate struggles he had educated himself highly, having cherished literary ambitions from his infancy. At this juncture it had become imperative that he should, for a few months at least, obtain food. Ann had chosen well by instinct. His speech had told her that he was intelligent, his eyes had told her that he would do anything on earth to earn his living.

From the time of his advent, Joseph Hutchinson had become calmer and had ceased to be in peril of apoplectic seizure. Foreign nations became less iniquitous and dangerous, foreign languages were less of a barrier, easier to understand. A pleasing impression that through great facility he had gained a fair practical knowledge of French, German, and Italian, supported and exhilarated him immensely.

“It’s right-down wonderful how a chap gets to understand these fellows’ lingo after he’s listened to it a bit,” he announced to Ann. “I wouldn’t have believed it of myself that I could see into it as quick as I have. I couldn’t say as I understand everything they say just when they’re saying it; but I understand it right enough when I’ve had time to translate like. If foreigners didn’t talk so fast and run their words one into another, and jabber as if their mouths was full of puddin’, it’d be easier for them as is English. Now, there’s `wee’ and `nong.’ I know ’em whenever I hear ’em, and that’s a good bit of help.”

“Yes,” answered Ann, “of course that’s the chief thing you want to know in business, whether a person is going to say `yes’ or `no.'”

He began to say “wee” and “nong” at meals, and once broke forth “Passy mor le burr” in a tone so casually Parisian that Ann was frightened, because she did not understand immediately, and also because she saw looming up before her a future made perilous by the sudden interjection of unexpected foreign phrases it would be incumbent upon her and Dudevant to comprehend instantaneously without invidious hesitation.

“Don’t you understand? Pass the butter. Don’t you understand a bit o’ French like that?” he exclaimed irritatedly. “Buy yourself one o’ these books full of easy sentences and learn some of ’em, lass. You oughtn’t to be travelin’ about with your father in foreign countries and learnin’ nothin’. It’s not every lass that’s gettin’ your advantages.”

Ann had not mentioned the fact that she spent most of her rare leisure moments in profound study of phrase-books and grammars, which she kept in her trunk and gave her attention to before she got up in the morning, after she went to her room at night, and usually while she was dressing. You can keep a book open before you when you are brushing your hair. Dudevant gave her a lesson or so whenever time allowed. She was as quick to learn as her father thought he was, and she was desperately determined. It was really not long before she understood much more than “wee and nong” when she was present at a business interview.

“You are a wonderful young lady,” Dudevant said, with that well-known yearning in his eyes. “You are most wonderful.”

“She’s just a wonder,” Mrs. Bowse and her boarders had said. And the respectful yearning in the young Frenchman’s eyes and voice were well known to her because she had seen it often before, and remembered it, in Jem Bowles and Julius Steinberger. That this young man had without an hour of delay fallen abjectly in love with her was a circumstance