ed his actions--if not his theories. No
more should his wife be compelled to scheme out painfully the employment
of her housekeeping allowance. Never again should there be a question
about a new frock for his daughter. He was conscious, before anything
else, of a triumphant protective and spoiling tenderness for his women.
He would be absurd with his women. He would ruin their characters with
kindness and with invitations to be capricious and exacting and
expensive and futile. They nobly deserved it. He wanted to shout and to
sing and to tell everybody that he would not in future stand any d----d
nonsense from anybody. He would have his way.

"Why!" thought he, pulling himself up. "I've developed all the
peculiarities of a millionaire in about a minute and a half."

And again, he cried to himself, in the vast and imperfectly explored
jungle that every man calls his heart:

"Ah! I could not have borne to give up either of my clubs! No! I was
deceiving myself. I could not have done it! I could not have done it!
Anything rather than that. I see it now.... By the way, I wonder what
all the fellows will say when they know! And how shall I break it to
them? Not to-day! Not to-day! To-morrow!"

At the moment when Mr. Prohack ought to have been resuming his
ill-remunerated financial toil for the nation at the Treasury, Bishop
suggested in his offhand murmuring style that they might pay a visit to
the City solicitor who was acting in England for him and the Angmering
estate. Mr. Prohack opposingly suggested that national duty called him
elsewhere.

"Does that matter--now?" said Bishop, and his accents were charged with
meaning.

Mr. Prohack saw that it did not matter, and that in future any nation
that did not like his office-hours would have to lump them. He feared
greatly lest he might encounter some crony-member on his way out of the
club with Bishop. If he did, what should he say, how should he carry off
the situation? (For he was feeling mysteriously guilty, just as he had
felt guilty an hour earlier. Not guilty as the inheritor of profiteering
in particular, but guilty simply as an inheritor. It might have been
different if he had come into the money in reasonable instalments, say
of five thousand pounds every six months. But a hundred thousand
unearned increment at one coup...!) Fortunately the cronies were still
in the smoking-room. He swept Bishop from the club, stealthily, swiftly.
Bishop had a big motor-car wai