mptuous little laugh. "I did not quarrel with
him--if you mean that," he said, "but even to please you, Thorpe, I
couldn't bring myself to put my back into the job of making money for
him. He was treated fairly--even generously, d'ye mind. I should think,
all told, he had some thirty thousand pounds for his shares, and that's
a hundred times as much as I had a pleasure in seeing him get. Each man
can wear his own parasites, but it's a task for him to stand another
man's. I shook your Lord Plowden off, when the chance came."

"THAT'S all right," Thorpe assured him, easily. "I never told you that
he was any good. I merely felt like giving him a leg up--because really
at the start he was of use to me. I did owe him something....It was at
his house that I met my wife."

"Aye," said Semple, with dispassionate brevity.

CHAPTER XXIV

WHEN he had parted with Semple, at a corner where the busy broker, who
had walked out with him, obviously fidgeted to get away, Thorpe could
think of no one else in the City whom he desired to see. A call upon
his bankers would, he knew, be made an occasion of extremely pleasant
courtesy by those affable people, but upon reflection it seemed scarcely
worth the trouble.

He was in a mood for indolent sauntering, and he made the long stretch
of the Holborn thoroughfare in a leisurely fashion, turning off when
the whim seized him into odd courts and alley-ways to see what they were
like. After luncheon, he continued his ramble, passing at last from
St. Giles, through avenues which had not existed in the London of his
boyhood, to the neighbourhood of the Dials. Here also the landmarks
seemed all changed, but there was still enough ostentatious squalor and
disorder to identify the district. He observed it and its inhabitants
with a certain new curiosity. A notable alteration for the better had
come over his spirits. It might be the champagne at luncheon, or it
might be the mere operation of a frank talk with Semple, that had
dissipated his gloom. At all events it was gone--and he strolled along
in quite placid contentment, taking in the panorama of London's more
intimate life with the interest of a Londoner who has obtained a fresh
country eye.

He who had seen most of the world, and not cared much about the
spectacle, found himself now consciously enjoying observation as he had
not supposed it possible to do. He surrendered himself to the experience
with a novel sense of having found s