haracter I had assumed.

The rest of that year and all the winter I passed living the normal life
of an indulged and pampered favorite of an opulent bachelor dilettante
noble. It was a life almost as enjoyable as the life of a wealthy nobleman
to which I had been born and brought up.

I had but one anxiety and that was not small and it steadily increased. It
was caused by a progressive alteration and deterioration in the character
of my master. In all other respects he remained the man he had been when
he first bought me, but as a gem-fancier his hobby became a passion which
deepened into a mania and colored, or discolored, all he did. He had, as
he always had had, a very large surplus of income over and above what was
needful to maintain his huge estates in Africa, his many luxurious villas
and town-palaces there, his yacht and his palaces in Italy at Baiae and at
Rome. The normal accumulation of this surplus had taxed his sagacity as an
investor, for it was always harder for him to find advantageous
investments for his redundant cash than to find cash for tempting
investments. Certainly his excess income more than sufficed for any
reasonable indulgence in gem-collecting.

Yet his outlay for rare gems ran up to and outran and far outran his
resources. The strange result was that he, who had huge revenues from
estates and safe investments, desired a still greater income. He began to
embark in risky ventures which promised large and quick returns. He went
into partnership with two different nobles, who made a practice of bidding
on the taxes of frontier provinces exposed to enemy raids. Bidders were
shy of investing their cash in the problematical returns of such regions
and those who had the hardihood to enter into contracts with the
government made huge profits if lucky. Falco was lucky each time. He
plunged again and again.

He also embarked similarly in bidding for unpromising contracts and in
buying up estates thrown unexpectedly on the market. All his ventures
turned out successfully, he gained great resources for indulging his fad
for gems and rare curios, his collection grew and became one of the most
famous private collections in Rome.

Also his mania for speculation grew as fast as his mania for collecting
gems.

This led to my exposure to the oddest and most alarming peril which I had
run since Agathemer and I crawled through the drain-pipe at Villa Andivia;
greater I think, than the risk I ran when I ne