"N-no," he replied, deliberately. "I guess—I won't."

"You won't?" Lady Joan repeated after him. "Then I will."

He made a stride forward and laid his hand on her arm.

"No. Not on your life. You won't, either—if I can help it. And you're going to LET me help it."

Almost any one but herself—any one, at least, who did not resent his very existence—would have felt the drop in his voice which suddenly struck the note of boyish, friendly appeal in the last sentence. "You're going to LET me," he repeated.

She stood looking down at the daring, unconscious hand on her arm.

"I suppose," she said, with cutting slowness, "that you do not even know that you are insolent. Take your hand away," in arrogant command.

He removed it with an unabashed half-smile.

"I beg your pardon," he said. "I didn't even know I'd put it there. It was a break—but I wanted to keep you."

That he not only wanted to keep her, but intended to do so was apparent. His air was neither rough nor brutal, but he had ingeniously placed himself in the outlet between the big table and the way to the door. He put his hands in his pockets in his vulgar, unconscious way, and watched her.

"Say, Lady Joan!" he broke forth, in the frank outburst of a man who wants to get something over. "I should be a fool if I didn't see that you're up against it—hard! What's the matter?" His voice dropped again.

There was something in the drop this time which—perhaps because of her recent emotion—sounded to her almost as if he were asking the question with the protecting sympathy of the tone one would use in speaking to a child. How dare he! But it came home to her that Jem had once said "What's the matter?" to her in the same way.

"Do you think it likely that I should confide in you?" she said, and inwardly quaked at the memory as she said it.

"No," he answered, considering the matter gravely. "It's not likely— the way things look to you now. But if you knew me better perhaps it would be likely."

"I once explained to you that I do not intend to know you better," she gave answer.

He nodded acquiescently.

"Yes. I got on to that. And it's because it's up to me that I came out here to tell you something I want you to know before you go away. I'm going to confide in you."

"Cannot even you see that I am not in the mood to accept confidences?" she exclaimed.

"Yes, I can. But you're going to accept this one," steadily. "No," as she made a swift movement, "I'm not going to clear the way till I've done."

"I insist!" she cried. "If you were—"

He put out his hand, but not to touch her.

"I know what you're going to say. If I were a gentleman—Well, I'm not laying claim to that—but I'm a sort of a man, anyhow, though you mayn't think it. And you're going to listen."

She began to stare at him. It was not the ridiculous boyish drop in his voice which arrested her attention. It was a fantastic, incongruous, wholly different thing. He had suddenly dropped his slouch and stood upright. Did he realize that he had slung his words at her as if they were an order given with the ring of authority?

"I've not bucked against anything you've said or done since you've been here," he went on, speaking fast and grimly. "I didn't mean to. I had my reasons. There were things that I'd have given a good deal to say to you and ask you about, but you wouldn't let me. You wouldn't give me a chance to square things for you—if they could be squared. You threw me down every time I tried!"

He was too wildly incomprehensible with his changes from humanness to folly. Remembering what he had attempted to say on the day he had followed her in the avenue, she was inflamed again.

"What in the name of New York slang does that mean?" she demanded.

"Never mind New York," he answered, cool as well as grim. "A fellow that's learned slang in the streets has learned something else as well. He's learned to keep his eyes open. He's on to a way of seeing things. And what I've seen is that you're so doggone miserable that— that you're almost down and out."

This time she spoke to him in the voice with the quality of deadliness in it which she had used to her mother.

"Do you think that because you are in your own house you can be as intrusively insulting as you choose?" she said.

"No, I don't," he answered. "What I think is quite different. I think that if a man has a house of his own, and there's any one in big trouble under the roof of it—a woman most of all—he's a cheap skate if he don't get busy and try to help—just plain, straight help."

He saw in her eyes all her concentrated disdain of him, but he went on, still obstinate and cool and grim.

"I guess 'help' is too big a word just yet. That may come later, and it mayn't. What I'm going to try at now is making it easier for you— just easier."

Her contemptuous gesture registered no impression on him as he paused a moment and looked fixedly at her.

"You just hate me, don't you?" It was a mere statement which couldn't have been more impersonal to himself if he had been made of wood. "That's all right. I seem like a low-down intruder to you. Well, that's all right, too. But what ain't all right is what your mother has set you on to thinking about me. You'd never have thought it yourself. You'd have known better."

"What," fiercely, "is that?"

"That I'm mutt enough to have a mash on you."

The common slangy crassness of it was a kind of shock. She caught her breath and merely stared at him. But he was not staring at her; he was simply looking straight into her face, and it amazingly flashed upon her that the extraordinary words were so entirely unembarrassed and direct that they were actually not offensive.

He was merely telling her something in his own way, not caring the least about his own effect, but absolutely determined that she should hear and understand it.

Her caught breath ended in something which was like a half-laugh. His queer, sharp, incomprehensible face, his queer, unmoved voice were too extraordinarily unlike anything she had ever seen or heard before.

"I don't want to be brash—and what I want to say may seem kind of that way to you. But it ain't. Anyhow, I guess it'll relieve your mind. Lady Joan, you're a looker—you're a beaut from Beautville. If I were your kind, and things were different, I'd be crazy about you— crazy! But I'm not your kind—and things are different." He drew a step nearer still to her in his intentness. "They're this different. Why, Lady Joan! I'm dead stuck on another girl!"

She caught her breath again, leaning forward.

"Another—!"

"She says she's not a lady; she threw me down just because all this darned money came to me," he hastened on, and suddenly he was imperturbable no longer, but flushed and boyish, and more of New York than ever. "She's a little bit of a quiet thing and she drops her h's, but gee—! You're a looker —you're a queen and she's not. But Little Ann Hutchinson— Why, Lady Joan, as far as this boy's concerned"—and he oddly touched himself on the breast—"she makes you look like thirty cents."

Joan quickly sat down on the chair she had just left. She rested an elbow on the table and shaded her face with her hand. She was not laughing; she scarcely knew what she was doing or feeling.

"You are in love with Ann Hutchinson," she said, in a low voice.

"Am I?" he answered hotly. "Well, I should smile!" He disdained to say more.

Then she began to know what she felt. There came back to her in flashes scenes from the past weeks in which she had done her worst by him; in which she had swept him aside, loathed him, set her feet on him, used the devices of an ingenious demon to discomfit and show him at his poorest and least ready. And he had not been giving a thought to the thing for which she had striven to punish him. And he plainly did not even hate her. His mind was clear, as water is clear. He had come back to her this evening to do her a good turn—a good turn. Knowing what she was capable of in the way of arrogance and villainous temper, he had determined to do her—in spite of herself—a good turn.

"I don't understand you," she faltered.

"I know you don't. But it's only because I'm so dead easy to understand. There's nothing to find out. I'm just friendly —friendly- -that's all."

"You would have been friends with me! " she exclaimed. "You would have told me, and I wouldn't let you! Oh!" with an impulsive flinging out of her hand to him, "you good —good fellow!"

"Good be darned! " he answered, taking the hand at once.

"You are good to tell me! I have behaved like a devil to you. But oh! if you only knew!"

His face became mature again; but he took a most informal seat on the edge of the table near her.

"I do know—part of it. That's why I've been trying to be friends with you all the time." He said his next words deliberately. "If I was the woman Jem Temple Barholm had loved wouldn't it have driven me mad to see another man in his place—and remember what was done to him. I never even saw him, but, good God! "—she saw his hand clench itself— "when I think of it I want to kill somebody! I want to kill half a dozen. Why didn't they know it couldn't be true of a fellow like that!"

She sat up stiffly and watched him.

"Do—you—feel like that—about him?"

"Do I!" red-hotly. "There were men there that knew him! There were women there that knew him! Why wasn't there just one to stand by him? A man that's been square all his life doesn't turn into a card-sharp in a night. Damn fools! I beg your pardon," hastily. And then, as hastily again: "No, I mean it. Damn fools!"

"Oh!" she gasped, just once.

Her passionate eyes were suddenly blinded with tears. She caught at his clenched hand and dragged it to her, letting her face drop on it and crying like a child.

The way he took her utter breaking down was just like him and like no one else. He put the other hand on her shoulder and spoke to her exactly as he had spoken to Miss Alicia on that first afternoon.

"Don't you mind me, Lady Joan," he said. "Don't you mind me a bit. I'll turn my back. I'll go into the billiard- room and keep them playing until you get away up-stairs. Now we understand each other, it'll be better for both of us."

"No, don't go! Don't!" she begged. "It is so wonderful to find some one who sees the cruelty of it." She spoke fast and passionately. "No one would listen to any defense of him. My mother simply raved when I said what you are saying."

"Do you want "—he put it to her with a curious comprehending of her emotion—"to talk about him? Would it do you good?"

"Yes! Yes! I have never talked to any one. There has been no one to listen."

"Talk all you want," he answered, with immense gentleness. "I'm here."

"I can't understand it even now, but he would not see me!" she broke out. "I was half mad. I wrote, and he would not answer. I went to his chambers when I heard he was going to leave England. I went to beg him to take me with him, married or unmarried. I would have gone on my knees to him. He was gone! Oh, why? Why?"

"You didn't think he'd gone because he didn't love you?" he put it to her quite literally and unsentimentally. "You knew better than that?"

"How could I be sure of anything! When he left the room that awful night he would not look at me! He would not look at me!"

"Since I've been here I've been reading a lot of novels, and I've found out a lot of things about fellows that are not the common, practical kind. Now, he wasn't. He'd lived pretty much like a fellow in a novel, I guess. What's struck me about that sort is that they think they have to make noble sacrifices, and they'll just walk all over a woman because they won't do anything to hurt her. There's not a bit of sense in it, but that was what he was doing. He believed he was doing the square thing by you—and you may bet your life it hurt him like hell. I beg your pardon—but that's the word—just plain hell."

"I was only a girl. He was like iron. He went away alone. He was killed, and when he was dead the truth was told."

"That's what I've remembered "—quite slowly—"every time I've looked at you. By gee! I'd have stood anything from a woman that had suffered as much as that."

It made her cry—his genuineness—and she did not care in the least that the tears streamed down her cheeks. How he had stood things! How he had borne, in that odd, unimpressive way, insolence and arrogance for which she ought to have been beaten and blackballed by decent society! She could scarcely bear it.

"Oh! to think it should have been you," she wept, "just you who understood!"

"Well," he answered speculatively, "I mightn't have understood as well if it hadn't been for Ann. By jings! I used to lie awake at night sometimes thinking 'supposing it bad been Ann and me!' I'd sort of work it out as it might have happened in New York—at the office of the Sunday Earth. Supposing some fellow that'd had a grouch against me had managed it so that Galton thought I'd been getting away with money that didn't belong to me—fixing up my expense account, or worse. And Galton wouldn't listen to what I said, and fired me; and I couldn't get a job anywhere else because I was down and out for good. And nobody would listen. And I was killed without clearing myself. And Little Ann was left to stand it—Little Ann! Old Hutchinson wouldn't listen, I know that. And it would be all shut up burning in her big little heart—burning. And T. T. dead, and not a word to say for himself. Jehoshaphat!"—taking out his handkerchief and touching his forehead—"it used to make the cold sweat start out on me. It's doing it now. Ann and me might have been Jem and you. That's why I understood."

He put out his hand and caught hers and frankly squeezed it—squeezed it hard; and the unconventional clutch was a wonderful thing to her.

"It's all right now, ain't it?" he said. "We've got it straightened out. You'll not be afraid to come back here if your mother wants you to." He stopped for a moment and then went on with something of hesitation: "We don't want to talk about your mother. We can't. But I understand her, too. Folks are different from each other in their ways. She's different from you. I'll—I'll straighten it out with her if you like."

"Nothing will need straightening out after I tell her that you are going to marry Little Ann Hutchinson," said Joan, with a half-smile. "And that you were engaged to her before you saw me."

"Well, that does sort of finish things up, doesn't it?" said T. Tembarom.

He looked at her so speculatively for a moment after this that she wondered whether he had something more to say. He had.

"There's something I want to ask you," he ventured.

"Ask anything."

"Do you know any one—just any one—who has a photo— just any old photo—of Jem Temple Barholm?"

She was rather puzzled.

"Yes. I know a woman who has worn one for nearly eight years. Do you want to see it?"

"I'd give a good deal to," was his answer.

She took a flat locket from her dress and handed it to him.

"Women don't wear lockets in these days." He could barely hear her voice because it was so low. "But I've never taken it off. I want him near my heart. It's Jem!"

He held it on the palm of his hand and stood under the light, studying it as if he wanted to be sure he wouldn't forget it.

"It's—sorter like that picture of Miles Hugo, ain't it?" he suggested.

"Yes. People always said so. That was why you found me in the picture- gallery the first time we met."

"I knew that was the reason—and I knew I'd made a break when I butted in," he answered. Then, still looking at the photograph, "You'd know this face again most anywhere you saw it, I guess."

"There are no faces like it anywhere," said Joan.

"I guess that's so," he replied. "And it's one that wouldn't change much either. Thank you, Lady Joan."

He handed back the picture, and she put out her hand again.

"I think I'll go to my room now," she said. "You've done a strange thing to me. You've taken nearly all the hatred and bitterness out of my heart. I shall want to come back here whether my mother comes or not—I shall want to."

"The sooner the quicker," he said. "And so long as I'm here I'll be ready and waiting."

"Don't go away," she said softly. "I shall need you."

"Isn't that great?" he cried, flushing delightedly. "Isn't it just great that we've got things straightened so that you can say that. Gee! This is a queer old world! There's such a lot to do in it, and so few hours in the day. Seems like there ain't time to stop long enough to hate anybody and keep a grouch on. A fellow's got to keep hustling not to miss the things worth while."

The liking in her eyes was actually wistful.

"That's your way of thinking, isn't it?" she said. "Teach it to me if you can. I wish you could. Good-night." She hesitated a second. "God bless you!" she added, quite suddenly—almost fantastic as the words sounded to her. That she, Joan Fayre, should be calling down devout benisons on the head of T. Tembarom—T. Tembarom!

Her mother was in her room when she reached it. She had come up early to look over her possessions—and Joan's—before she began her packing. The bed, the chairs, and tables were spread with evening, morning, and walking-dresses, and the millinery collected from their combined wardrobes. She was examining anxiously a lace appliqued and embroidered white coat, and turned a slightly flushed face toward the opening door.

"I am going over your things as well as my own," she said. "I shall take what I can use. You will require nothing in London. You will require nothing anywhere in future. What is the matter?" she said sharply, as she saw her daughter's face.

Joan came forward feeling it a strange thing that she was not in the mood to fight—to lash out and be glad to do it.

"Captain Palliser told me as I came up that Mr. Temple Barholm had been talking to you," her mother went on. "He heard you having some sort of scene as he passed the door. As you have made your decision, of course I know I needn't hope that anything has happened."

"What has happened has nothing to do with my decision. He wasn't waiting for that," Joan answered her. "We were both entirely mistaken, Mother."

"What are you talking about?" cried Lady Mallowe, but she temporarily laid the white coat on a chair. "What do you mean by mistaken?"

"He doesn't want me—he never did," Joan answered again. A shadow of a smile hovered over her face, and there was no derision in it, only a warming recollection of his earnestness when he had said the words she quoted: "He is what they call in New York 'dead stuck on another girl."'

Lady Mallowe sat down on the chair that held the white coat, and she did not push the coat aside.

"He told you that in his vulgar slang!" she gasped it out. "You—you ought to have struck him dead with your answer."

"Except poor Jem Temple Barholm," was the amazing reply she received, "he is the only friend I ever had in my life."



CHAPTER XXXII

It was business of serious importance which was to bring Captain Palliser's visit to a close. He explained it perfectly to Miss Alicia a day or so after Lady Mallowe and her daughter left them. He had lately been most amiable in his manner toward Miss Alicia, and had given her much valuable information about companies and stocks. He rather unexpectedly found it imperative that he should go to London and Berlin to "see people"—dealers in great financial schemes who were deeply interested in solid business speculations, such as his own, which were fundamentally different from all others in the impeccable firmness of their foundations.

"I suppose he will be very rich some day," Miss Alicia remarked the first morning she and T. Tembarom took their breakfast alone together after his departure. "It would frighten me to think of having as much money as he seems likely to have quite soon."

"It would scare me to death," said Tembarom. She knew he was making a sort of joke, but she thought the point of it was her tremor at the thought of great fortune.

"He seemed to think that it would be an excellent thing for you to invest in—I'm not sure whether it was the India Rubber Tree Company, or the mahogany forests or the copper mines that have so much gold and silver mixed in them that it will pay for the expense of the digging— " she went on.

"I guess it was the whole lot," put in Tembarom.

"Perhaps it was. They are all going to make everybody so rich that it is quite bewildering. He is very clever in business matters. And so kind. He even said that if I really wished it he might be able to invest my income for me and actually treble it in a year. But of course I told him that my income was your generous gift to me, and that it was far more than sufficient for my needs."

Tembarom put down his coffee-cup so suddenly to look at her that she was fearful that she had appeared to do Captain Palliser some vague injustice.

"I am sure he meant to be most obliging, dear," she explained. "I was really quite touched. He said most sympathetically and delicately that when women were unmarried, and unaccustomed to investment, sometimes a business man could be of use to them. He forgot"—affectionately— "that I had you."

Tembarom regarded her with tender curiosity. She often opened up vistas for him as he himself opened them for the Duke of Stone.

"If you hadn't had me, would you have let him treble your income in a year?" he asked.

Her expression was that of a soft, woodland rabbit or a trusting spinster dove.

"Well, of course, if one were quite alone in the world and had only a small income, it would be nice to have it wonderfully added to in such a short time," she answered. "But it was his friendly solicitude which touched me. I have not been accustomed to such interested delicacy on the part of—of gentlemen." Her hesitance before the last word being the result of training, which had made her feel that it was a little bold for "ladies" to refer quite openly to "gentlemen."

"You sometimes read in the newspapers," said Tembarom, buttering his toast, "about ladies who are all alone in the world with a little income, but they're not often left alone with it long. It's like you said—you've got me; but if the time ever comes when you haven't got me just you make a dead-sure thing of it that you don't let any solicitous business gentleman treble your income in a year. If it's an income that comes to more than five cents, don't you hand it over to be made into fifteen. Five cents is a heap better—just plain five."

"Temple!" gasped Miss Alicia. "You—you surely cannot mean that you do not think Captain Palliser is—sincere!"

Tembarom laughed outright, his most hilarious and comforting laugh. He had no intention of enlightening her in such a manner as would lead her at once to behold pictures of him as the possible victim of appalling catastrophes. He liked her too well as she was.

"Sincere?" he said. "He's sincere down to the ground —in what he's reaching after. But he's not going to treble your income, nor mine. If he ever makes that offer again, you just tell him I'm interested, and that I'll talk it over with him."

"I could not help saying to him that I didn't think you could want any more money when you had so much," she added, "but he said one never knew what might happen. He was greatly interested when I told him you had once said the very same thing yourself."

Their breakfast was at an end, and he got up, laughing again, as he came to her end of the table and put his arm around her shoulders in the unconventional young caress she adored him for.

"It's nice to be by ourselves again for a while," he said. "Let us go for a walk together. Put on the little bonnet and dress that are the color of a mouse. Those little duds just get me. You look so pretty in them."

The sixteen-year-old blush ran up to the roots of her gray side- ringlets. Just imagine his remembering the color of her dress and bonnet, and thinking that anything could make her look pretty! She was overwhelmed with innocent and grateful confusion. There really was no one else in the least like him.

"You do look well, ma'am," Rose said, when she helped her to dress. "You've got such a nice color, and that tiny bit of old rose Mrs. Mellish put in the bonnet does bring it out."

"I wonder if it is wrong of me to be so pleased," Miss Alicia thought. "I must make it a subject of prayer, and ask to be aided to conquer a haughty and vain-glorious spirit."

She was pathetically serious, having been trained to a view of the Great First Cause as figuratively embodied in the image of a gigantic, irascible, omnipotent old gentleman, especially wrought to fury by feminine follies connected with becoming headgear.

"It has sometimes even seemed to me that our Heavenly Father has a special objection to ladies," she had once timorously confessed to Tembarom. "I suppose it is because we are so much weaker than men, and so much more given to vanity and petty vices."

He had caught her in his arms and actually hugged her that time. Their intimacy had reached the point where the affectionate outburst did not alarm her.

"Say!" he had laughed. "It's not the men who are going to have the biggest pull with the authorities when folks try to get into the place where things are evened up. What I'm going to work my passage with is a list of the few 'ladies' I've known. You and Ann will be at the head of it. I shall just slide it in at the box-office window and say, 'Just look over this, will you? These were friends of mine, and they were mighty good to me. I guess if they didn't turn me down, you needn't. I know they're in here. Reserved seats. I'm not expecting to be put with them but if I'm allowed to hang around where they are that'll be heaven enough for me.'"

"I know you don't mean to be irreverent, dear Temple," she gasped. "I am quite sure you don't! It is—it is only your American way of expressing your kind thoughts. And of course"—quite hastily—"the Almighty must understand Americans—as he made so many." And half frightened though she was, she patted his arm with the warmth of comfort in her soul and moisture in her eyes. Somehow or other, he was always so comforting.

He held her arm as they took their walk. She had become used to that also, and no longer thought it odd. It was only one of the ways he had of making her feel that she was being taken care of. They had not been able to have many walks together since the arrival of the visitors, and this occasion was at once a cause of relief and inward rejoicing. The entire truth was that she had not been altogether happy about him of late. Sometimes, when he was not talking and saying amusing New York things which made people laugh, he seemed almost to forget where he was and to be thinking of something which baffled and tried him. The way in which he pulled himself together when he realized that any one was looking at him was, to her mind, the most disturbing feature of his fits of abstraction. It suggested that if he really had a trouble it was a private one on which he would not like her to intrude. Naturally, her adoring eyes watched him oftener than he knew, and she tried to find plausible and not too painful reasons for his mood. He always made light of his unaccustomedness to his new life; but perhaps it made him feel more unrestful than he would admit.

As they walked through the park and the village, her heart was greatly warmed by the way in which each person they met greeted him. They greeted no one else in the same way, and yet it was difficult to explain what the difference was. They liked him— really liked him, though how he had overcome their natural distrust of his newsboy and bootblack record no one but himself knew. In fact, she had reason to believe that even he himself did not know—had indeed never asked himself. They had gradually begun to like him, though none of them had ever accused him of being a gentleman according to their own acceptance of the word. Every man touched his cap or forehead with a friendly grin which spread itself the instant he caught sight of him. Grin and salute were synchronous. It was as if there were some extremely human joke between them. Miss Alicia had delightedly remembered a remark the Duke of Stone had made to her on his return from one of their long drives.

"He is the most popular man in the county," he had chuckled. "If war broke out and he were in the army, he could raise a regiment at his own gates which would follow him wheresoever he chose to lead it—if it were into hottest Hades."

Tembarom was rather silent during the first part of their walk, and when he spoke it was of Captain Palliser. "He's a fellow that's got lots of curiosity. I guess he's asked you more questions than he's asked me," he began at last, and he looked at her interestedly, though she was not aware of it.

"I thought—" she hesitated slightly because she did not wish to be critical—"I sometimes thought he asked me too many."

"What was he trying to get on to mostly?"

"He asked so many things about you and your life in New York—but more, I think, about you and Mr. Strangeways. He was really quite persistent once or twice about poor Mr. Strangeways."

"What did he ask?"

"He asked if I had seen him, and if you had preferred that I should not. He calls him your Mystery, and thinks your keeping him here is so extraordinary."

"I guess it is—the way he'd look at it," Tembarom dropped in.

"He was so anxious to find out what he looked like. He asked how old he was and how tall, and whether he was quite mad or only a little, and where you picked him up, and when, and what reason you gave for not putting him in some respectable asylum. I could only say that I really knew nothing about him, and that I hadn't seen him because he had a dread of strangers and I was a little timid."

She hesitated again.

"I wonder," she said, still hesitating even after her pause, "I wonder if I ought to mention a rather rude thing I saw him do twice?"

"Yes, you ought," Tembarom answered promptly; "I've a reason for wanting to know."

"It was such a singular thing to do—in the circumstances," she went on obediently. "He knew, as we all know, that Mr. Strangeways must not be disturbed. One afternoon I saw him walk slowly backward and forward before the west room window. He had something in his hand and kept looking up. That was what first attracted my attention—his queer way of looking up. Quite suddenly he threw something which rattled on the panes of glass—it sounded like gravel or small pebbles. I couldn't help believing he thought Mr. Strangeways would be startled into coming to the window."

Tembarom cleared his throat.

"He did that twice," he said. "Pearson caught him at it, though Palliser didn't know he did. He'd have done it three times, or more than that, perhaps, but I casually mentioned in the smoking-room one night that some curious fool of a gardener boy had thrown some stones and frightened Strangeways, and that Pearson and I were watching for him, and that if I caught him I was going to knock his block off— bing! He didn't do it again. Darned fool! What does he think he's after?"

"I am afraid he is rather—I hope it is not wrong to say so —but he is rather given to gossip. And I dare say that the temptation to find something quite new to talk about was a great one. So few new things happen in the neighborhood, and, as the duke says, people are so bored—and he is bored himself."

"He'll be more bored if he tries it again when he comes back," remarked Tembarom.

Miss Alicia's surprised expression made him laugh.

"Do you think he will come back?" she exclaimed. "After such a long visit?"

"Oh, yes, he'll come back. He'll come back as often as he can until he's got a chunk of my income to treble—or until I've done with him."

"Until you've done with him, dear?" inquiringly.

"Oh! well,"—casually—"I've a sort of idea that he may tell me something I'd like to know. I'm not sure; I'm only guessing. But even if he knows it he won't tell me until he gets good and ready and thinks I don't want to hear it. What he thinks he's going to get at by prowling around is something he can get me in the crack of the door with."

"Temple"—imploringly—"are you afraid he wishes to do you an injury?"

"No, I'm not afraid. I'm just waiting to see him take a chance on it," and he gave her arm an affectionate squeeze against his side. He was always immensely moved by her little alarms for him. They reminded him, in a remote way, of Little Ann coming down Mrs. Bowse's staircase bearing with her the tartan comforter.

How could any one—how could any one want to do him an injury? she began to protest pathetically. But he would not let her go on. He would not talk any more of Captain Palliser or allow her to talk of him. Indeed, her secret fear was that he really knew something he did not wish her to be troubled by, and perhaps thought he had said too much. He began to make jokes and led her to other subjects. He asked her to go to the Hibblethwaites' cottage and pay a visit to Tummas. He had learned to understand his accepted privileges in making of cottage visits by this time; and when he clicked any wicket-gate the door was open before he had time to pass up the wicket-path. They called at several cottages, and he nodded at the windows of others where faces appeared as he passed by.

They had a happy morning together, and he took her back to Temple Barholm beaming, and forgetting Captain Palliser's existence, for the time, at least. In the afternoon they drove out together, and after dining they read the last copy of the Sunday Earth, which had arrived that day. He found quite an interesting paragraph about Mr. Hutchinson and the invention. Little Miss Hutchinson was referred to most flatteringly by the writer, who almost inferred that she was responsible not only for the inventor but for the invention itself. Miss Alicia felt quite proud of knowing so prominent a character, and wondered what it could be like to read about oneself in a newspaper.

About nine o'clock he laid his sheet of the Earth down and spoke to her.

"I'm going to ask you to do me a favor," he said. "I couldn't ask it if we weren't alone like this. I know you won't mind."

Of course she wouldn't mind. She was made happier by the mere idea of doing something for him.

"I'm going to ask you to go to your room rather early," he explained. "I want to try a sort of stunt on Strangeways. I'm going to bring him downstairs if he'll come. I'm not sure I can get him to do it; but he's been a heap better lately, and perhaps I can."

"Is he so much better as that?" she said. "Will it be safe?"

He looked as serious as she had ever seen him look—even a trifle more serious.

"I don't know how much better he is," was his answer. "Sometimes you'd think he was almost all right. And then—! The doctor says that if he could get over being afraid of leaving his room it would be a big thing for him. He wants him to go to his place in London so that he can watch him."

"Do you think you could persuade him to go?"

"I've tried my level best, but so far—nothing doing."

He got up and stood before the mantel, his back against it, his hands in his pockets.

"I've found out one thing," he said. "He's used to houses like this. Every now and again he lets something out quite natural. He knew that the furniture in his room was Jacobean - that's what he called it - and he knew it was fine stuff. He wouldn't have known that if he'd been a piker. I'm going to try if he won't let out something else when he sees things here - if he'll come."

"You have such a wonderfully reasoning mind, dear," said Miss Alicia, as she rose. "You would have made a great detective, I'm sure."

"If Ann had been with him," he said, rather gloomily, "she'd have caught on to a lot more than I have. I don't feel very chesty about the way I've managed it."

Miss Alicia went up-stairs shortly afterward, and half an hour later Tembarom told the footmen in the hall that they might go to bed. The experiment he was going to make demanded that the place should be cleared of any disturbing presence. He had been thinking it over for sometime past. He had sat in the private room of the great nerve specialist in London and had talked it over with him. He had talked of it with the duke on the lawn at Stone Hover. There had been a flush of color in the older man's cheek-bones, and his eyes had been alight as he took his part in the discussion. He had added the touch of his own personality to it, as always happened.

"We are having some fine moments, my good fellow," he had said, rubbing his hands. "This is extremely like the fourth act. I'd like to be sure what comes next."

"I'd like to be sure myself," Tembarom answered. "It's as if a flash of lightning came sometimes, and then things clouded up. And sometimes when I am trying something out he'll get so excited that I daren't go on until I've talked to the doctor."

It was the excitement he was dubious about to-night. It was not possible to be quite certain as to the entire safety of the plan; but there might be a chance - even a big chance - of wakening some cell from its deadened sleep. Sir Ormsby way had talked to him a good deal about brain cells, and he had listened faithfully and learned more than he could put into scientific English. Gradually, during the past months, he had been coming upon strangely exciting hints of curious possibilities. They had been mere hints at first, and had seemed almost absurd in their unbelievableness. But each one had linked itself with another, and led him on to further wondering and exploration. When Miss Alicia and Palliser had seen that he looked absorbed and baffled, it had been because he had frequently found himself, to use his own figures of speech, "mixed up to beat the band." He had not known which way to turn; but he had gone on turning because he could not escape from his own excited interest, and the inevitable emotion roused by being caught in the whirl of a melodrama. That was what he'd dropped into—a whacking big play. It had begun for him when Palford butted in that night and told him he was a lost heir, with a fortune and an estate in England; and the curtain had been jerking up and down ever since. But there had been thrills in it, queer as it was. Something doing all the time, by gee!

He sat and smoked his pipe and wished Ann were with him because he knew he was not as cool as he had meant to be. He felt a certain tingling of excitement in his body; and this was not the time to be excited. He waited for some minutes before he went up-stairs. It was true that Strangeways had been much better lately. He had seemed to find it easier to follow conversation. During the past few days, Tembarom had talked to him in a matter-of-fact way about the house and its various belongings. He had at last seemed to waken to an interest in the picture-gallery. Evidently he knew something of picture- galleries and portraits, and found himself relieved by his own clearness of thought when he talked of them.

"I feel better," he said, two or three times. "Things seem clearer— nearer."

"Good business!" exclaimed Tembarom. "I told you it'd be that way. Let's hold on to pictures. It won't be any time before you'll be remembering where you've seen some."

He had been secretly rather strung up; but he had been very gradual in approaching his final suggestion that some night, when everything was quiet, they might go and look at the gallery together.

"What you need is to get out of the way of wanting to stay in one place," he argued. "The doctor says you've got to have a change, and even going from one room to another is a fine thing."

Strangeways had looked at him anxiously for a few moments, even suspiciously, but his face had cleared after the look. He drew himself up and passed his hand over his forehead.

"I believe - perhaps he is right," he murmured.

"Sure he's right!" said Tembarom. "He's the sort of chap who ought to know. He's been made into a baronet for knowing. Sir Ormsby Galloway, by jings! That's no slouch of a name Oh, he knows, you bet your life!"

This morning when he had seen him he had spoken of the plan again. The visitors had gone away; the servants could be sent out of sight and hearing; they could go into the library and smoke and he could look at the books. And then they could take a look at the picture-gallery if he wasn't too tired. It would be a change anyhow.

To-night, as he went up the huge staircase, Tembarom's calmness of being had not increased. He was aware of a quickened pulse and of a slight dampness on his forehead. The dead silence of the house added to the unusualness of things. He could not remember ever having been so anxious before, except on the occasion when he had taken his first day's "stuff" to Galton, and had stood watching him as he read it. His forehead had grown damp then. But he showed no outward signs of excitement when he entered the room and found Strangeways standing, perfectly attired in evening dress.

Pearson, setting things in order at the other side of the room, was taking note of him furtively over his shoulder. Quite in the casual manner of the ordinary man, he had expressed his intention of dressing for the evening, and Pearson had thanked his stars for the fact that the necessary garments were at hand. From the first, he had not infrequently asked for articles such as only the resources of a complete masculine wardrobe could supply; and on one occasion he had suddenly wished to dress for dinner, and the lame excuses it had been necessary to make had disturbed him horribly instead of pacifying him. To explain that his condition precluded the necessity of the usual appurtenances would have been out of the question. He had been angry. What did Pearson mean? What was the matter? He had said it over and over again, and then had sunk into a hopelessly bewildered mood, and had sat huddled in his dressing-gown staring at the fire. Pearson had been so harrowed by the situation that it had been his own idea to suggest to his master that all possible requirements should be provided. There were occasions when it appeared that the cloud over him lifted for a passing moment, and a gleam of light recalled to him some familiar usage of his past. When he had finished dressing, Pearson had been almost startled by the amount of effect produced by 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."