rival. If he had to use undesirables for business purposes
he used them only for that, in a crisp, hard way, and never went to
their houses. Every acquaintance even was selected with care for a
definite end. One of his favorite phrases was that "it is only the fool
who coins for himself limitations."

At this time, as he sat smoking a fine cigar in his library which looked
out on the park, he was perhaps forty-six years old or thereabouts, and
but for his eyes--wise as serpents'--he might have been ten years
younger.

Opposite to him facing the light a young man lounged in a great leather
chair. The visitors in Francis Markrute's library nearly always faced
the light, while he himself had his back to it.

There was no doubt about this visitor's nation! He was flamboyantly
English. If you had wished to send a prize specimen of the race to a
World's Fair you could not have selected anything finer. He was perhaps
more Norman than Saxon, for his hair was dark though his eyes were blue,
and the marks of breeding in the creature showed as plainly as in a
Derby winner. Francis Markrute always smoked his cigars to the end, if
he were at leisure and the weed happened to be a good one, but Lord
Tancred (Tristram Lorrimer Guiscard Guiscard, 24th Baron Tancred, of
Wrayth in the County of Suffolk) flung his into the grate after a few
whiffs, and he laughed with a slightly whimsical bitterness as he went
on with the conversation.

"Yes, Francis, my friend, the game here is played out; I am thirty, and
there is nothing interesting left for me to do but emigrate to Canada,
for a while at least, and take up a ranch."

"Wrayth mortgaged heavily, I suppose?" said Mr. Markrute, quietly.

"Pretty well, and the Northern property, too. When my mother's jointure
is paid there is not a great deal left this year, it seems. I don't mind
much; I had a pretty fair time before these beastly Radicals made things
so difficult."

The financier nodded, and the young man went on: "My forbears got rid of
what they could; there was not much ready money to come into and one had
to live!"

Francis Markrute smoked for a minute thoughtfully.

"Naturally," he said at last. "Only the question is--for how long? I
understand a plunge, if you settle its duration; it is the drifting and
trusting to chance, and a gradual sinking which seem to me a poor game.
Did you ever read de Musset's 'Rolla'?"

"The fellow who had arrived at his last night, and to who