down. The
lawyer was immediately interested.

"Do I understand, then," he asked, addressing the newcomer, "that you
knew Sir Everard in Africa?"

Seaman beamed. "Knew him?" he repeated, and with the first words of his
speech the fact of his foreign nationality was established. "There was
no one of whom I knew so much. We did business together--a great deal of
business--and when we were not partners, Sir Everard generally got the
best of it."

Dominey laughed. "Luck generally comes to a man either early or late
in life. My luck came late. I think, Seaman, that you must have been my
mascot. Nothing went wrong with me during the years that we did business
together."

Seaman was a little excited. He brushed upright with the palm of his
hand one of those little tufts of hair left on the side of his head, and
he laid his plump fingers upon the lawyer's shoulder.

"Mr. Mangan," he said, "you listen to me. I sell this man the
controlling interests in a mine, shares which I have held for four and
a half years and never drew a penny dividend. I sell them to him, I say,
at par. Well, I need the money and it seems to me that I had given the
shares a fair chance. Within five weeks--five weeks, sir," he repeated,
struggling to attune his voice to his civilised surroundings, "those
shares had gone from par to fourteen and a half. To-day they stand at
twenty. He gave me five thousand pounds for those shares. To-day
he could walk into your stock market and sell them for one hundred
thousand. That is the way money is made in Africa, Mr. Mangan, where
innocents like me are to be found every day."

Dominey poured out a glass of wine and passed it to their visitor.

"Come," he said, "we all have our ups and downs. Africa owes you
nothing, Seaman."

"I have done well in my small way," Seaman admitted, fingering the stem
of his wineglass, "but where I have had to plod, Sir Everard here has
stood and commanded fate to pour her treasures into his lap."

The lawyer was listening with a curious interest and pleasure to this
half bantering conversation. He found an opportunity now to intervene.

"So you two were really friends in Africa?" he remarked, with a queer
and almost inexplicable sense of relief.

"If Sir Everard permits our association to be so called," Seaman
replied. "We have done business together in the great cities--in
Johannesburg and Pretoria, in Kimberley and Cape Town--and we have
prospected together in the wild pl