craving petered out, and he took a hand in the collecting game. What will come next I don’t know. As a boy I was always afraid of him. He was kind to me, but in the abstract. I was like an extra on the grocer’s bill. He put me into the hands of a tutor—a lovable old dreamer—and paid no more attention to me. He never put his arms round me and told me fairy stories.”

106

“Poor little boy! No fairy stories!”

“Nary a one until I began to have playmates.”

“Do the ropes hurt?”

“They might if I were alone.”

“What do you make of the beads?”

“Only that they have some strange value, or father wouldn’t be after them. Love beads! Doesn’t sound half so plausible as Cunningham’s version.”

“That handsome man who limped?”

“Yes.”

“A real adventurer—the sort one reads about!” 107

107

“And the queer thing about him, he keeps his word, too, for all his business is a shady one. I don’t suppose there is a painting or a jewel or a book of the priceless sort that he doesn’t know about, where it is and if it can be got at. Some of his deals are aboveboard, but many of them aren’t. I’ll wager these beads have a story of loot.”

“What he steals doesn’t hurt the poor.”

“So long as the tigers fight among themselves and leave the goats alone, it doesn’t stir you. Is that it?”

“Possibly.”

“And besides, he’s a handsome beggar, if there ever was one.”

“He has the face of an angel!”

“And the soul of a vandal!”—with a touch of irritability.

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