th their correspondence or
their leisure. For a few months he had been assistant editor and
business manager of a paper devoted to fancy mice, but the devotion had
been all on one side, and the paper disappeared with a certain abruptness
from club reading-rooms and other haunts where it had made a gratuitous
appearance. Still, Rex lived with some air of comfort and well-being, as
one can live if one is born with a genius for that sort of thing, and a
kindly Providence usually arranged that his week-end invitations
coincided with the dates on which his one white dinner-waistcoat was in a
laundry-returned condition of dazzling cleanness. He played most games
badly, and was shrewd enough to recognise the fact, but he had developed
a marvellously accurate judgement in estimating the play and chances of
other people, whether in a golf match, billiard handicap, or croquet
tournament. By dint of parading his opinion of such and such a player's
superiority with a sufficient degree of youthful assertiveness he usually
succeeded in provoking a wager at liberal odds, and he looked to his week-
end winnings to carry him through the financial embarrassments of his mid-
week existence. The trouble was, as he confided to Clovis Sangrail, that
he never had enough available or even prospective cash at his command to
enable him to fix the wager at a figure really worth winning.

"Some day," he said, "I shall come across a really safe thing, a bet that
simply can't go astray, and then I shall put it up for all I'm worth, or
rather for a good deal more than I'm worth if you sold me up to the last
button."

"It would be awkward if it didn't happen to come off," said Clovis.

"It would be more than awkward," said Rex; "it would be a tragedy. All
the same, it would be extremely amusing to bring it off. Fancy awaking
in the morning with about three hundred pounds standing to one's credit.
I should go and clear out my hostess's pigeon-loft before breakfast out
of sheer good-temper."

"Your hostess of the moment mightn't have a pigeon-loft," said Clovis.

"I always choose hostesses that have," said Rex; "a pigeon-loft is
indicative of a careless, extravagant, genial disposition, such as I like
to see around me. People who strew corn broadcast for a lot of feathered
inanities that just sit about cooing and giving each other the glad eye
in a Louis Quatorze manner are pretty certain to do you well."

"Young Strinnit is coming down thi