m curiously. For thirty years his had been
something like a household name in the city. He had been responsible, he
and the great firm of which he was the head, for international finance
conducted on the soundest principles, finance which scorned speculation,
finance which rolled before it the great snowball of automatically
accumulated wealth. His father had been given the baronetcy which he
now enjoyed, and which, as he knew very well, might at any moment be
transferred into a peerage. He was a short, rather thick-set man,
with firm jaws and keen blue eyes, carefully dressed in somewhat
old-fashioned style, with horn-rimmed eyeglass hung about his neck with
a black ribbon. His hair was a little close-cropped and stubbly. No
one could have called him handsome, no one could have found him
undistinguished. Even without the knowledge of his millions, people who
glanced at him recognised the atmosphere of power.

"Wonder what old Anselman's thinking about," one man asked another in an
opposite corner.

"Money bags," was the prompt reply. "The man thinks money, he dreams
money, he lives money. He lives like a prince but he has no pleasures.
From ten in the morning till two, he sites in his office in Lombard
Street, and the pulse of the city beats differently in his absence."

"I wonder!" the other murmured.

Other people had wondered, too. Still the keen blue eyes looked across
through the misty atmosphere at the grey building opposite. Men and
women passed before him in a constant, unseen procession. No one came
and spoke to him, no one interfered with his meditations. The two men
who had been discussing him passed out of the room presently one of them
glanced backwards in his direction.

"After all, I suppose," he observed, as he passed down the hall, "there
is something great about wealth or else one wouldn't believe that old
Anselman there was thinking of his money-bags. Why, here's Granet. Good
fellow! I'd no idea you'd joined this august company of old fogies."

Granet smiled as he shook hands.

"I haven't," he explained. "You have to be a millionaire, don't you,
and a great political bug, before they'd let you in? No place for poor
soldiers! I have to be content with the Rag."

"Poor devil!" his friend remarked sympathetically,--"best cooking, best
wines in London. These Service men look after themselves all right. What
are you doing here, anyhow, Granet?"

"I'm dining with my uncle," Granet replied, quickl