whom everybody believed to be the heir of one of the oldest titles and
richest rent-rolls in England was the son of a Clapham bricklayer, a
master of audacity and of fraud.

The mother--a worthy and simple soul--was the first to explain that
Paul, her only son, had always been something of a gentleman. He had
done very well at school, and never done a stroke of work like 'is
father. When he was fifteen he was quite stage-struck. "Always
play-acting," as the mother put it, "and could recite poetry
beautiful!"

Mrs. Baker seemed distinctly proud of her son's deeply rooted horror
of work. She thought that all the instincts of a gentleman were really
in him. When he was a grown lad, he went as footman in a gentleman's
family somewhere in the Midlands. The mother loftily supposed that it
was there that Paul learned his good manners.

"He was a perfect gentleman, sir," she reiterated complacently.

It appeared too that the wastrel had had a period in his career when
the call of the stage proved quite irresistible, for he seemed to have
left the gentleman's family in the Midlands somewhat abruptly and
walked on as super for a time in the various melodramas produced at
the Grand Theatre, Nottingham, whenever a crowd was required on the
stage. There seems also to have existed a legend in the heart of the
fond mother and of the doting sister that Paul had once really played
a big part in a serious play. But this statement was distinctly
wanting in corroboration.

What was obviously an established fact was that the man had a certain
spirit of adventure in him, and that he had been a regular rolling
stone, a regular idle, good-for-nothing wastrel, possessing a certain
charm of manner which delighted his family and which was readily
mistaken by the simple folk for that of a gentleman.

They were all called in turn; the sister, and young Smith "from next
door," and the latter's sister. Not one of them swerved for a moment
from the original story told by Jim Baker. Emily and young Smith told
of the meeting which occurred on a fine summer's afternoon between
themselves and Paul. By the strange caprice of wanton coincidence the
meeting occurred inside Green Park. Paul seemed a little worried,
thinking that the passers-by would see him talking to "poor people
like us," as Emily Baker had it, "although," she added proudly, "I 'ad
me new 'at on, with the pink roses." Otherwise he was quite pleasant
and not at all "off-'and."

The