Did you know him?"

"I can't say I did," Louis replied, with some constraint.

Rachel said with generous enthusiasm--

"He's a wonderful shot, my brother is!"

Louis was curiously touched by the warmth of her reference to her
brother. In the daily long monotonous column of advertisements headed
succinctly "Money" in the _Staffordshire Signal_, there once
used to appear the following invitation: "WE NEVER REFUSE a loan to
a responsible applicant. No fussy inquiries. Distance no objection.
Reasonable terms. Strictest privacy. L3 to L10,000. Apply personally
or by letter. Lovelace Curzon, 7 Colclough Street, Knype." Upon a day
Louis had chosen that advertisement from among its rivals, and had
written to Lovelace Curzon. But on the very next day he had come
into his thousand pounds, and so had lost the advantage of business
relations with Lovelace Curzon. Lovelace Curzon, as he had learnt
later, was Reuben Fleckring, Rachel's father. Or, more accurately,
Lovelace Curzon was Reuben Fleckring, junior, Rachel's brother, a
young man in a million. Reuben, senior, had been for many years an
entirely mediocre and ambitionless clerk in a large works where
Julian Maldon had learnt potting, when Reuben, junior (whom he blindly
adored), had dragged him out of clerkship, and set him up as
the nominal registered head of a money-lending firm. An amazing
occurrence! At that time Reuben, junior, was a minor, scarcely
eighteen. Yet his turn for finance had been such that he had
already amassed reserves, and--without a drop of Jewish blood in his
veins--possessed confidence enough to compete in their own field with
the acutest Hebrews of the district. Reuben, senior, was the youth's
tool.

In a few years Lovelace Curzon had made a mighty and terrible
reputation in the world where expenditures exceed incomes. And
then the subterranean news of the day--not reported in the
_Signal_--was that something serious had happened to Lovelace
Curzon. And the two Fleckrings went to America, the father, as usual,
hypnotized by the son. And they left no wrack behind save Rachel.

It was at this period--only a few months previous to the opening of
the present narrative--that the district had first heard aught of the
womenfolk of the Fleckrings. An aunt--Reuben, senior's, sister, it
appeared--had died several years earlier, since when Rachel had alone
kept house for her brother and her father. According to rumour
the three had lived in the simplicity