m with guinea-pigs."

"Ah, but, he isn't the guinea-pig variety at all," Thorpe asserted,
warmly. "He's really a splendid fellow--with his little oddities, like
the rest of us, of course, but a decent chap all through. Place?
I should think he HAD got a place! It's one of the swellest old
country-houses you ever saw--older than hell, you know--and it's kept
up as if they had fifty thousand a year. Do you happen to know what his
real income is supposed to be?"

Semple shook his head. He had taken his hat, and was smoothing it deftly
with the palm of his hand.

"I asked," Thorpe went on, "because he had so much to say about his
poverty. To hear him talk, you'd think the bailiffs were sitting on his
doorstep. That doesn't prevent his having fast horses, and servants all
over the place, and about the best shooting I've seen in the South of
England. As luck would have it, I was in wonderful form. God! how I
knocked the pheasants!" A clerk showed his head at the door, with a
meaning gesture. "I must go now," said Semple, briskly, and led the way
out to another room. He halted here, and dismissed his caller with the
brief injunction, "Don't go away without seeing me."

It was the noon-hour, and the least-considered grades of the City's
slaves were in the streets on the quest for cheap luncheons. Thorpe
noted the manner in which some of them studied the large bill of
fare placarded beside a restaurant door; the spectacle prompted him
luxuriously to rattle the gold coins remaining in his pocket. He had
been as anxious about pence as the hungriest of those poor devils, only
a week before. And now! He thrust up the door in the roof of the cab,
and bade the driver stop at his bank. Thence, after some brief but very
agreeable business, and a hurried inspection of the "Court" section of
a London Directory, he drove to a telegraph station and despatched two
messages. They were identical in terms. One sought General Kervick
at his residence--he was in lodgings somewhere in the Hanover Square
country--and the other looked for him at his club. Both begged him to
lunch at the Savoy at two o'clock.

There was time and to spare, now. Thorpe dismissed the cab at his
hotel--an unpretentious house in Craven Street, and sent his luggage to
his rooms. There were no letters for him on the board in the hallway,
and he sauntered up to the Strand. As by force of habit, he turned
presently into a side-street, and stopped opposite the ancient boo