supply your father with.
Bless me! Mr. Montague Dartie was a customer here from--let me see--the
year Melton won the Derby. One of my very best customers he was." A
faint smile illumined the tobacconist's face. "Many's the tip he's given
me, to be sure! I suppose he took a couple of hundred of these every
week, year in, year out, and never changed his cigarette. Very affable
gentleman, brought me a lot of custom. I was sorry he met with that
accident. One misses an old customer like him."

Val smiled. His father's decease had closed an account which had been
running longer, probably, than any other; and in a ring of smoke
puffed out from that time-honoured cigarette he seemed to see again his
father's face, dark, good-looking, moustachioed, a little puffy, in the
only halo it had earned. His father had his fame here, anyway--a man
who smoked two hundred cigarettes a week, who could give tips, and
run accounts for ever! To his tobacconist a hero! Even that was some
distinction to inherit!

"I pay cash," he said; "how much?"

"To his son, sir, and cash--ten and six. I shall never forget Mr.
Montague Dartie. I've known him stand talkin' to me half an hour. We
don't get many like him now, with everybody in such a hurry. The War was
bad for manners, sir--it was bad for manners. You were in it, I see."

"No," said Val, tapping his knee, "I got this in the war before. Saved
my life, I expect. Do you want any cigarettes, Jon?"

Rather ashamed, Jon murmured, "I don't smoke, you know," and saw the
tobacconist's lips twisted, as if uncertain whether to say "Good God!"
or "Now's your chance, sir!"

"That's right," said Val; "keep off it while you can. You'll want it
when you take a knock. This is really the same tobacco, then?"

"Identical, sir; a little dearer, that's all. Wonderful staying
power--the British Empire, I always say."

"Send me down a hundred a week to this address, and invoice it monthly.
Come on, Jon."

Jon entered the Iseeum with curiosity. Except to lunch now and then at
the Hotch-Potch with his father, he had never been in a London Club. The
Iseeum, comfortable and unpretentious, did not move, could not, so long
as George Forsyte sat on its Committee, where his culinary acumen was
almost the controlling force. The Club had made a stand against the
newly rich, and it had taken all George Forsyte's prestige, and praise
of him as a "good sportsman," to bring in Prosper Profond.

The two were lunching t