le.

In the course of the next half-hour Bindle learned a great deal about
Mr. Reginald Graves, who had reached Oxford by means of scholarship,
and considered that he had suffered loss of caste in consequence. His
one object in life was to undo the mischief wrought by circumstances.
He could not boast of a long line of ancestry; in fact, on one occasion
when in a reminiscent mood he had remarked:

"I had a grandfather----"

"Had you?" was the scathing comment of another man. The story had been
retailed with great gusto among the men of St. Joseph's.

Reginald Graves was a snob, which prompted him to believe that all men
were snobs. _Burke's Peerage_ and _Kelly's Landed Gentry_ were at once
his inspiration and his cross. He used them constantly himself,
looking up the ancestry of every man he met. He was convinced that his
lack of "family" was responsible for his unpopularity.

In his opinion, failing "blood" the next best thing to possess was
money, and he lost no opportunity of throwing out dark and covert hints
as to the enormous wealth possessed by the Graves and Williams
families, Williams being his mother's maiden name.

His favourite boast, however, was of an uncle in Australia. Josiah
Williams had, according to Graves, emigrated many years before.
Fortune dogged his footsteps with almost embarrassing persistence
until, at the time that his nephew Reginald went up to Oxford, he was a
man of almost incredible wealth. He owned mines that produced fabulous
riches, and runs where the sheep were innumerable.

Graves was purposely vague as to the exact location of his uncle's
sheep-stations, and on one occasion he spent an unhappy evening
undergoing cross-examination by an Australian Rhodes scholar. However,
he persisted in his story, and Australia was a long way off, and it was
very unlikely that anyone would be sufficiently interested to unearth
and identify all its millionaires in order to prove that Josiah
Williams and his millions existed only in the imagination of his
alleged nephew.

Graves was a thin, pale-faced young man with nondescript features and
an incipient moustache. Furthermore, he had what is known as a narrow
dental arch, which gave to his face a peevish expression. When he
smiled he bared two large front teeth that made him resemble a rabbit.
His hair was as colourless as his personality. He was entirely devoid
of imagination, or, as Tom Little phrased it, "What he lacked in divin