office on Friday
evening I saw that gold mask to which I had taken so strange a fancy
that I offered to give Vernon L17,000 for it because I thought that it
brought us luck, swim across the floor of our room and look first into
your face and then into mine. Well, the next night that negro tells his
story. What am I to make of it?"

"Can't tell you," answered Mr. Champers-Haswell with a groan. "All I
know is that it nearly made a corpse of me. I am not like you, Aylward,
I was brought up as an Evangelical, and although I haven't given much
thought to these matters of late years--well, we don't shake them off in
a hurry. I daresay there is something somewhere, and when the black
man was speaking, that something seemed uncommonly near. It got up and
gripped me by the throat, shaking the mortal breath out of me, and upon
my word, Aylward, I have been wishing all the morning that I had led a
different kind of life, as my old parents and my brother John, Barbara's
father, who was a very religious kind of man, did before me."

"It is rather late to think of all that now, Haswell," said Sir Robert,
shrugging his shoulders. "One takes one's line and there's an end.
Personally I believe that we are overstrained with the fearful and
anxious work of this flotation, and have been the victims of an
hallucination and a coincidence. Although I confess that I came to look
upon the thing as a kind of mascot, I put no trust in any fetish. How
can a bit of gold move, and how can it know the future? Well, I have
written to them to clear it out of the office to-morrow, so it won't
trouble us any more. And now I have come to speak to you on another
matter."

"Not business," said Mr. Haswell with a sigh. "We have that all the week
and there will be enough of it on Monday."

"No," he answered, "something more important. About your niece Barbara."

Mr. Haswell glanced at him with those little eyes of his which were so
sharp that they seemed to bore like gimlets.

"Barbara?" he said. "What of Barbara?"

"Can't you guess, Haswell? You are pretty good at it, generally. Well,
it is no use beating about the bush; I want to marry her."

At this sudden announcement his partner became exceedingly interested.
Leaning back in the chair he stared at the decorated ceiling, and
uttered his favourite wind-in-the-wires whistle.

"Indeed," he said. "I never knew that matrimony was in your line,
Aylward, any more than it has been in mine, especially as