ay the people out.

Darco travelled with his own company, majestically Astrachan-furred
and splendid, but rarely clean-shaven. Nine days in ten an aggressive
stubble on cheek and chin seemed to sprout from an inward sense of his
own glorious import.

'I am Cheorge Dargo,' he said unfailingly to every provincial
stage-manager he met 'I nefer sbeaks to beobles twice.'

His brutalities of demeanour earned for him the noisy hatred of scores
of people. His hidden benefactions bought for him the silent blessings
of some suffering unit in every town. He bullied by instinct in public.
He blessed the suffering by instinct in private. He was cursed by
ninety-nine in the hundred, and the odd man adored him. Paul's heart
fastened to the uncouth man, and he did him burningly eager service.

Paul was in clover, and had sense enough to know it.

'I regognise the zymptoms,' said Darco, when they had been on tour a
week. 'I am not going to haf my insbirations in the tay-dime any longer.
All my crate iteas will gome to me now for some dime in the night. You
haf got to be near me, young Armstrong. You must sday vith me in the
zame lotchings.'

This meant that Darco paid his whole expenses, and that his salary came
to him each week intact. He began to save money and to develop at the
same time an inexpensive dandyism. He took to brown velveteen and to
patent leather boots. He bought a secondhand watch at a pawnbroker's,
but disdained a chain. His father had inspired him with a horror of
jewellery; for once, when he had spent the savings of a month upon a
cheap scarf-pin, the elder Armstrong had wrathfully asked him what he
meant by sticking that brass-headed nail in his chest, and had thrown
the gewgaw into the fire. But the watch for the first week or two was a
token of established manhood, and it was consulted a full hundred times
a day, and was corrected by every public clock he passed.

His occupation was no sinecure, for Darco was running half-a-dozen
companies, and kept up a fire of correspondence with each. He had dramas
on the anvil, too, and dictated by the hour every day. Often he woke
Paul in the dead of night, and routed him out of bed, and gave him notes
of some prodigious idea which had just occurred to him.

Darco had an unfailing formula with his landladies: 'Prek-fasd for
three, lunge for three, tinner for three; petrooms and zidding-room for
two,' He worked for three and ate for two.

'I am in many respegs,' he