a newspaper of our own. When you
are with me you know I'm a man; when you get away from me you think I'm
a cheat and a cad.... There's not a word of truth in the things they say
about us. I've been slack. I've left things. But we have only to exert
ourselves. You do not know how wide and far we have spread our nets.
Even now we have a coup--an expedition--in hand. It will put us on a
footing."...

Her eyes asked mutely and asked in vain that I would cease to boast of
the very qualities she admired in me.

In the night I could not sleep for thinking of that talk and the vulgar
things I had said in it. I could not understand the drift my mind had
taken. I was acutely disgusted. And my unwonted doubts about myself
spread from a merely personal discontent to our financial position.
It was all very well to talk as I had done of wealth and power and
peerages, but what did I know nowadays of my uncle's position? Suppose
in the midst of such boasting and confidence there came some turn I did
not suspect, some rottenness he had concealed from me? I resolved I had
been playing with aeronautics long enough; that next morning I would go
to him and have things clear between us.

I caught an early train and went up to the Hardingham.

I went up to the Hardingham through a dense London fog to see how things
really stood. Before I had talked to my uncle for ten minutes I felt
like a man who has just awakened in a bleak, inhospitable room out of a
grandiose dream.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

HOW I STOLE THE HEAPS OF QUAP FROM MORDET ISLAND

I

"We got to make a fight for it," said my uncle. "We got to face the
music!"

I remember that even at the sight of him I had a sense of impending
calamity. He sat under the electric light with the shadow of his hair
making bars down his face. He looked shrunken, and as though his skin
had suddenly got loose and yellow. The decorations of the room seemed
to have lost freshness, and outside the blinds were up--there was not so
much fog as a dun darkness. One saw the dingy outlines of the chimneys
opposite quite distinctly, and then a sky of such brown as only London
can display.

"I saw a placard," I said: "'More Ponderevity.'"

"That's Boom," he said. "Boom and his damned newspapers. He's trying to
fight me down. Ever since I offered to buy the Daily Decorator he's
been at me. And he thinks consolidating Do Ut cut down the ads. He wants
everything, damn him! He's got no sense of dealing. I