y lemon-coloured rocks and an azure sea. Other
refinements, such as silken window-blinds, striped green and white,
keeping the blinding sparkle of that sea from invading the cool recesses
of voluptuous chambers, came to him from time to time. But he could not
talk about it. He did not even speak to his wife of his dream. He
believed she knew without his telling her. She knew nothing about it,
imagining that he was merely concocting some little surprise such as
buying a cottage in the country down in Warwickshire, where she believed
her people came from in the days of William the Fourth. Buying cottages
was not her husband's idea of solidifying a position, however. For him,
living in a hovel while making money was justified by frugality and
convenience, but retiring to a cottage would be a confession of defeat.

So he did not enlighten Mr. Spokesly. He paused awhile and then remarked
that he hoped to get finished with business some day. No one could
possibly take exception to this.

They did not see the officer who had been so anxious for Mr. Spokesly to
visit the Persian Gulf during the coming summer. That gentleman had gone
to see a dentist, it appeared, and a young writer informed them that it
would be all right so long as the captain of the vessel was British.

"Yes, he's British all right--Captain Rannie--he's got a passport," said
Mr. Dainopoulos. And when he was asked when he would be ready to load,
he said as soon as the Captain gave him a berth.

"He put us three mile away, and it takes a tug an hour and a half to get
to the ship," he remarked, "with coal like what it is now."

"Well, of course we can't put everybody at the pier, you know," said the
young writer genially, quite forgetting that Mr. Dainopoulos had deftly
inserted an item in the _charte partie_ which gave him a generous
allowance for lighterage.

"All right," said he, as though making a decent concession. "You know
they tell me they want this stuff in a hurry, eh?"

The young writer did not know but he pretended he did, and said he would
attend to it. So they bade him good day and took their way back to the
Bureau de Change. Mr. Dainopoulos had left it in charge of a young Jew,
a youth so desperately poor and so fanatically honest that he seemed a
living caricature of all moral codes. Neither his poverty nor his
probity seemed remarkable enough to keep him in employment, doubtless
because, like millions of other people in southeastern Europe