the other man’s face.

“Yes,” insisted the older man. “You don’t believe me. You young fellows see only the worst and the best, and if the best doesn’t tumble into your hands, you are sure at once that there’s nothing for you but the worst. Just listen to me!”

Paul took hold upon himself. He was ashamed already of his outburst.

“You are very kind, sir,” he said, and some appreciation of the goodwill which the older man had shown to him, in baring his own wounds, and drawing out into the light again old humiliations and guilt long since atoned, pierced even through the youth’s sharp consciousness of his own miseries. He rose up from his chair. He was in command of his emotions now, his voice was steady.

“I have been thinking too much of myself and the distress into which this revelation has plunged me,” he said, “and too little of your great consideration and kindness. What you have told me, you cannot have said without pain and a good deal of reluctance. I am very grateful. Indeed I wonder why you ever received me here at all.”

“You would have found out the truth without my help.”

“That’s what I mean,” said Paul. “I should have found it out through an enquiry agent, and the news would have been ten times more hideous coming in that way rather than broken gently here. Whilst on the other hand you would have spared yourself.”

“That’s all right,” Colonel Vanderfelt answered uncomfortably, and to himself he added: “Yes, old Ferguson wrote the truth. That boy’s clean and a gentleman.” He pressed Paul down into his chair again.

“Come! Take a glass of this old brandy first—it’s not so bad—and then we’ll talk your prospects over like the men of the world we both are—eh? Neither making light of serious things nor exaggerating them until we make endeavour useless.”

He fetched to the table a couple of big goblets mounted on thin stems within which delicate spirals had been blown, and poured a liqueur of his best brandy into each.

“I have an idea, Paul. It has been growing all the time we have been talking together. Let’s see if it means anything to you.”

He held his goblet to his nose and smelt the brandy. “Pretty good, this! Try it, Paul. There’s not a cough nor a splutter in it. Well, now,” he went on when Paul had taken his advice, “in the 

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