said my
solicitor. Though he is now a solicitor he was once just an ordinary
boy like the rest of us, and it was in those days that he acquired the
habit of being rude to me, a habit he has never quite forgotten.

"What is an onyx?" I said, changing the conversation.

"Why?" asked my solicitor, with his usual business acumen.

"Well, I was practically certain that I had seen one in the Zoo, in the
reptile house, but I have just learnt that it is my lucky month stone.
Naturally I want to get one."

The coffee came and we settled down to commerce.

"I was just going to ask you," said my solicitor--"have you any money
lying idle at the bank? Because if so----"

"Whatever else it is doing, it isn't lying idle," I protested. "I was at
the bank to-day, and there were men chivying it about with shovels all
the time."

"Well, how much have you got?"

"About fifty pounds."

"It ought to be more than that."

"That's what I say, but you know what those banks are. Actual merit
counts for nothing with them."

"Well, what did you want to do with it?"

"Exactly. That was why I rang you up. I--er----" This was really my
moment, but somehow I was not quite ready to seize it. My vast
commercial enterprise still lacked a few trifling details. "Er--I--well,
it's like that."

"I might get you a few ground rents."

"Don't. I shouldn't know where to put them."

"But if you really have fifty pounds simply lying idle I wish you'd lend
it to me for a bit. I'm confoundedly hard up."

("_Generous to a fault, you have a ready sympathy with the distressed._"
Dash it, what could I do?)

"Is it quite etiquette for clients to lend solicitors money?" I asked.
"I thought it was always solicitors who had to lend it to clients. If I
must, I'd rather lend it to you--I mean I'd dislike it less--as to the
old friend of my childhood."

"Yes, that's how I wanted to pay it back."

"Bother. Then I'll send you a cheque to-night," I sighed.

And that's where we are at the moment. "_People born in this month
always keep their promises._" The money has got to go to-night. If I
hadn't been born in January, I shouldn't be sending it; I certainly
shouldn't have promised it; I shouldn't even have known that I had it.
Sometimes I almost wish that I had been born in one of the decent
months. March, say.

XII. THE RESCUE

William Bales--as nice a young man as ever wore a cummerbund on an
esplanade--was in despair. For half-an-hour he a