f a slim purse.

In the rear of the shop--which was looked after by a salesman--was a
small office almost opulent in its appearance. Soft rugs covered the
floor, and costly paintings hung on the walls. The chairs and desk, the
huge couch, would have graced a palace, and a piece of priceless
tapestry partly overhung the big safe at one end. An incandescent lamp
was burning brightly, for very little light entered from the dreary
court on which a single window opened.

Here, at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, Stephen Foster sat poring over a
sheaf of papers. He was a man of fifty-two, nearly six feet tall and
correspondingly built--a man with a fine head and handsome features, a
man to attract more than ordinary attention. His hands were white, slim
and long. His eyes were deep brown, and his mustache and beard--the
latter cut to a point--were of a tawny yellowish-brown color, mixed with
gray to a slight degree. It would be difficult to analyze his character,
for in many ways he was a contradiction. He was not miserly, but his
besetting evil was the love of accumulating money--the lever that had
made him thoroughly unscrupulous. He was rich, or reputed so, but in
amassing gold, by fair means or foul, lay the keynote to his life. And
it was a dual life. He had chosen the old mansion at Strand-on-the-Green
to be out of the roar and turmoil of London life, and yet within touch
of it. Here, where his evenings were mostly spent, he was a different
man. He derived his chief pleasures from his daughter's society, from a
table filled with current literature, from a box of choice Havanas. In
town he was a sordid man of business, clever at buying and selling to
the best advantage. He had loved his wife, the daughter of a city
alderman and a friend of his father's, and her death twelve years before
had been a great blow to him. Madge resembled her, and he gave the girl
a father's sincere devotion.

Few persons knew that Stephen Foster was the proprietor of the
curio-shop in Wardour street--his daughter was among the ignorant--and
but one or two were aware that the business of Benjamin and Company,
carried on in Duke street, belonged also to him. None, assuredly, among
his sprinkling of acquaintances, would have believed that he could stoop
to lower things, or that he and his equally unscrupulous and useful
tool, Victor Nevill, the gay young-man-about-town, had been mixed up in
more than one nefarious transaction that would not bear the