st making the most. I look upon our
little transaction as being exactly on parallel lines. We knew that
the Shoreditch Music Hall was meant. The people who advanced the money
thought that the Leicester Square Music Hall was meant. Therefore, we
make the money."

Jacob rose to his feet. He was feeling a little dazed.

"Your ideas of commercial ethics, Marquis," he acknowledged, "are
excellent in their way, but do you imagine that they will be shared by
the members of your family who have parted with their money?"

"I trust, sir," the Marquis replied stiffly, "that they will behave
like sportsmen and see the humour of the transaction."

"I hope they will!" Jacob murmured fervently, as he took his leave.

"In any case," the Marquis concluded complacently, "their cheques have
been cashed."

CHAPTER XIX

In the course of his financial peregrinations amongst the highways and
byways of the city, Mr. Dane Montague made many acquaintances. It
chanced that soon after the exploitation of the Shoreditch Empress
Music Hall, a flotation which brought Mr. Montague many admirers from
the underworlds of finance, it fell to his lot to give a luncheon
party to celebrate the culmination of a subsidiary financial swindle
and to plan further activities in the same direction. His guests were
Philip Mason, the well-known man about town, and Joe Hartwell, the
trans-atlantic young adventurer. After the third bottle of champagne,
it transpired that the luncheon party had a further object.

"It's queer that you should have run across the little beast, too,"
Mr. Dane Montague observed. "Got it laid by for him, haven't you?"

Mason's good-looking but dissipated face was suddenly ugly.

"If I could wring his neck," he muttered, "I'd do it to-morrow and
thank my stars."

"He'll get his some day from this guy," Joe Hartwell added earnestly.
"I'm kind of hanging round for the chance."

Mr. Montague ordered expensive cigars and the three men's heads drew a
little closer together.

"We ought to be able to put it across him," the host continued. "We've
brains enough, and between us we know the ropes. The only thing is
that it's pretty difficult to hurt him financially. I believe it's a
fact that he's well on towards his second million."

"There are other ways," Hartwell remarked, draining his glass with
slow, unwholesome deliberation. "If I'd got him in New York I should
know what to do. I guess there are back doors in this little