cessively upholstered chairs with an earthenware Moorish table between
us bearing coffee and Benedictine, and I was tasting the delights of a
tenpenny cigar. My uncle smoked a similar cigar in an habituated manner,
and he looked energetic and knowing and luxurious and most unexpectedly
a little bounder, round the end of it. It was just a trivial flaw
upon our swagger, perhaps that we both were clear our cigars had to be
"mild." He got obliquely across the spaces of his great armchair so as
to incline confidentially to my ear, he curled up his little legs, and
I, in my longer way, adopted a corresponding receptive obliquity. I felt
that we should strike an unbiased observer as a couple of very deep and
wily and developing and repulsive persons.

"I want to let you into this"--puff--"George," said my uncle round the
end of his cigar. "For many reasons."

His voice grew lower and more cunning. He made explanations that to my
inexperience did not completely explain. I retain an impression of a
long credit and a share with a firm of wholesale chemists, of a credit
and a prospective share with some pirate printers, of a third share for
a leading magazine and newspaper proprietor.

"I played 'em off one against the other," said my uncle. I took his
point in an instant. He had gone to each of them in turn and said the
others had come in.

"I put up four hundred pounds," said my uncle, "myself and my all. And
you know--"

He assumed a brisk confidence. "I hadn't five hundred pence. At least--"

For a moment he really was just a little embarrassed. "I DID" he said,
"produce capital. You see, there was that trust affair of yours--I
ought, I suppose--in strict legality--to have put that straight first.
Zzzz....

"It was a bold thing to do," said my uncle, shifting the venue from
the region of honour to the region of courage. And then with a
characteristic outburst of piety, "Thank God it's all come right!

"And now, I suppose, you ask where do YOU come in? Well, fact is I've
always believed in you, George. You've got--it's a sort of dismal grit.
Bark your shins, rouse you, and you'll go! You'd rush any position you
had a mind to rush. I know a bit about character, George--trust me.
You've got--" He clenched his hands and thrust them out suddenly, and at
the same time said, with explosive violence, "Wooosh! Yes. You have! The
way you put away that Latin at Wimblehurst; I've never forgotten it.

"Wo-oo-oo-osh! Your science