ouble cough.

"As regards Mr. Carlyle's personal appearance, sir--"

"No, enough!" cried the gentleman concerned hastily. "I am more than
satisfied. You are a keen observer, Parkinson."

"I have trained myself to suit my master's requirements, sir," replied
the man. He looked towards Mr. Carrados, received a nod and withdrew.

Mr. Carlyle was the first to speak.

"That man of yours would be worth five pounds a week to me, Max," he
remarked thoughtfully. "But, of course--"

"I don't think that he would take it," replied Carrados, in a voice of
equally detached speculation. "He suits me very well. But you have the
chance of using his services--indirectly."

"You still mean that--seriously?"

"I notice in you a chronic disinclination to take me seriously, Louis.
It is really--to an Englishman--almost painful. Is there something
inherently comic about me or the atmosphere of The Turrets?"

"No, my friend," replied Mr. Carlyle, "but there is something
essentially prosperous. That is what points to the improbable. Now
what is it?"

"It might be merely a whim, but it is more than that," replied Carrados.
"It is, well, partly vanity, partly _ennui_, partly"--certainly there
was something more nearly tragic in his voice than comic now--"partly
hope."

Mr. Carlyle was too tactful to pursue the subject.

"Those are three tolerable motives," he acquiesced. "I'll do anything
you want, Max, on one condition."

"Agreed. And it is?"

"That you tell me how you knew so much of this affair." He tapped the
silver coin which lay on the table near them. "I am not easily
flabbergasted," he added.

"You won't believe that there is nothing to explain--that it was
purely second-sight?"

"No," replied Carlyle tersely: "I won't."

"You are quite right. And yet the thing is very simple."

"They always are--when you know," soliloquised the other. "That's what
makes them so confoundedly difficult when you don't."

"Here is this one then. In Padua, which seems to be regaining its old
reputation as the birthplace of spurious antiques, by the way, there
lives an ingenious craftsman named Pietro Stelli. This simple soul,
who possesses a talent not inferior to that of Cavino at his best, has
for many years turned his hand to the not unprofitable occupation of
forging rare Greek and Roman coins. As a collector and student of
certain Greek colonials and a specialist in forgeries I have been
familiar with Stelli's workmanship for yea