was childish, and he knew it. But to
save his life the Duke didn't know how to begin. None of the things
that he was able to talk about seemed to have the remotest connection
with the subject of money. The Duke was able to converse reasonably
well over such topics as the approaching downfall of England (they had
talked of it at Dulham Towers for sixty years), or over the duty of
England towards China, or the duty of England to Persia, or its duty to
aid the Young Turk Movement, and its duty to check the Old Servia
agitation. The Duke became so interested in these topics and in
explaining that while he had never been a Little Englander he had
always been a Big Turk, and that he stood for a Small Bulgaria and a
Restricted Austria, that he got further and further away from the topic
of money, which was what he really wanted to come to; and the Duke rose
from his conversations with a look of such obvious distress on his face
that everybody realized that his anxiety about England was killing him.

And then suddenly light had come. It was on his fourth day in New York
that he unexpectedly ran into the Viscount Belstairs (they had been
together as young men in Nigeria, and as middle-aged men in St.
Petersburg), and Belstairs, who was in abundant spirits and who was
returning to England on the _Gloritania_ at noon the next day,
explained to the Duke that he had just borrowed fifty thousand pounds,
on security that wouldn't be worth a halfpenny in England.

And the Duke said with a sigh, "How the deuce do you do it. Belstairs?"

"Do what?"

"Borrow it," said the Duke. "How do you manage to get people to talk
about it? Here I am wanting to borrow a hundred thousand, and I'm
hanged if I can even find an opening."

At which the Viscount had said, "Pooh, pooh! you don't need any
opening. Just borrow it straight out--ask for it across a dinner table,
just as you'd ask for a match; they think nothing of it here."

"Across the dinner table?" repeated the Duke, who was a literal man.

"Certainly," said the Viscount. "Not too soon, you know--say after a
second glass of wine. I assure you it's absolutely nothing."

And it was just at that moment that a telegram was handed to the Duke
from Mr. Lucullus Fyshe, praying him, as he was reported to be visiting
the next day the City where the Mausoleum Club stands, to make
acquaintance with him by dining at that institution.

And the Duke, being as I say a literal man, decided that jus