stranger long and hard. “Yes,” she murmured, turning to her husband, “he does, who is it?”
“I cannot fix it,” replied the Colonel; “I thought that maybe you would remember.”
“It will come to me,” mused Mrs. Devine. “It is someone—years ago, when I was a girl—in Devonshire. Thank you, if it isn’t troubling you, Harry. I left it in the dining-room.”
It was, as Mr. Augustus Longcord explained to his partner Isidore, the colossal foolishness of the stranger that was the cause of all the trouble. “Give me a man, who can take care of himself—or thinks he can,” declared Augustus Longcord, “and I am prepared to give a good account of myself. But when a helpless baby refuses even to look at what you call your figures, tells you that your mere word is sufficient for him, and hands you over his cheque-book to fill up for yourself—well, it isn’t playing the game.”
“Auguthuth,” was the curt comment of his partner, “you’re a fool.”
“All right, my boy, you try,” suggested Augustus.
“Jutht what I mean to do,” asserted his partner.
“Well,” demanded Augustus one evening later, meeting Isidore ascending the stairs after a long talk with the stranger in the dining-room with the door shut.
“Oh, don’t arth me,” retorted Isidore, “thilly ath, thath what he ith.”
“What did he say?”
“What did he thay! talked about the Jewth: what a grand rathe they were—how people mithjudged them: all that thort of rot.
“Thaid thome of the motht honorable men he had ever met had been Jewth. Thought I wath one of ‘em!”
“Well, did you get anything out of him?”
“Get anything out of him. Of courthe not. Couldn’t very well thell the whole rathe, ath it were, for a couple of hundred poundth, after that. Didn’t theem worth it.”
There were many things Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square came gradually to the conclusion were not worth the doing:—Snatching at the gravy; pouncing out of one’s turn upon the
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