y inquiries in the City. I had, however,
very little to go upon, and after I had left Fenchurch Street behind
me, and drifted into literature, I forgot him.

Until one day I received a letter addressed to the care of my
publishers. It bore the Swiss postmark, and opening it and turning to
the signature I sat wondering for the moment where I had met "Horatio
Jones." And then I remembered.

He was lying bruised and broken in a woodcutter's hut on the slopes of
the Jungfrau. Had been playing a fool's trick, so he described it,
thinking he could climb mountains at his age. They would carry him
down to Lauterbrunnen as soon as he could be moved farther with safety,
but for the present he had no one to talk to but the nurse and a Swiss
doctor who climbed up to see him every third day. He begged me, if I
could spare the time, to come over and spend a week with him. He
enclosed a hundred-pound cheque for my expenses, making no apology for
doing so. He was complimentary about my first book, which he had been
reading, and asked me to telegraph him my reply, giving me his real
name, which, as I had guessed it would, proved to be one of the best
known in the financial world. My time was my own now, and I wired him
that I would be with him the following Monday.

He was lying in the sun outside the hut when I arrived late in the
afternoon, after a three-hours' climb followed by a porter carrying my
small amount of luggage. He could not raise his hand, but his
strangely brilliant eyes spoke their welcome.

"I am glad you were able to come," he said. "I have no near relations,
and my friends--if that is the right term--are business men who would
be bored to tears. Besides, they are not the people I feel I want to
talk to, now."

He was entirely reconciled to the coming of death. Indeed, there were
moments when he gave me the idea that he was looking forward to it with
an awed curiosity. With the conventional notion of cheering him, I
talked of staying till he was able to return with me to civilisation,
but he only laughed.

"I am not going back," he said. "Not that way. What they may do
afterwards with these broken bones does not much concern either you or
me.

"It's a good place to die in," he continued. "A man can think up here."

It was difficult to feel sorry for him, his own fate appearing to make
so little difference to himself. The world was still full of interest
to him--not his own particular corner