at he must
overlook no opportunity if he was to prove himself the successful man
that his father had so ardently wished him to become, Bobby dropped
into the Idlers' Club for lunch, where Nick Allstyne and Payne
Winthrop hailed him as one returned from the dead.

"Just the chap," declared Nick. "Stan Rogers has written me that I'm
to scrape the regular crowd together and come up to his new Canadian
lodge for a hunt. Stag affair, you know. Real sport and no pink-coat
pretense."

"Sorry, Nick," said Bobby, pluming himself a trifle upon his
steadfastness to duty, "but I know what Stan's stag affairs are like.
It would mean two weeks at least, and I could not spare that much time
from the city."

"Business again!" groaned Payne in mock dismay. "This grasping greed
for gain is blighting the most promising young men of our avaricious
country. Why, it's positively shameful, Bobby, when your father must
have left you over three million."

"Two hundred and fifty thousand, so far as I'm allowed to inquire just
now," corrected Bobby; "and I'm ordered to go into business with that
and prove that I'm not such a blithering idiot that I can't be trusted
with the rest of it, whatever there is."

"But I thought you'd had your trial by fire and pulled out of it,"
interposed Nick. "I heard that you had sold your interests or
something, and when I saw a new sign over the store I knew that it was
true. Sensible thing, I call it."

"Sensible!" winced Bobby. "You're allowing me a mighty pleasant way
out of it, but the fact of the matter is that I lost in such a
stinging way I'm bound to get back into the game and do nothing else
until I win," and he explained how Silas Trimmer had performed upon
him a neat and delicate operation in commercial surgery.

They were properly sympathetic; not that they cared much about
business, but if Bobby had entered any game whatsoever in which he had
been soundly beaten, they could quite understand his desire to stay in
that game until he could show points on the right side.

"Nevertheless," Nick urged, "you ought to take a little breathing
spell in between."

All through lunch, and through the game of billiards which followed,
they strove to make him see the error of his ways, but Bobby was
obdurate, and at last they gave him up as a bad job, with the grave
prediction that later he would find himself nothing more nor less than
a beast of burden. When he left them Bobby was surprised at himself.