ressed in grey veiling spotted white, with
an encrustation of mousseline de soie," I learnt the next day from the
_Morning Post_. Old Hasluck himself had to be fetched every time he
was wanted. At the conclusion of the ceremony, seeking him, I found him
sitting on the stairs leading to the crypt.

"Is it over?" he asked. He was mopping his face on a huge handkerchief,
and had a small looking-glass in his hand.

"All over," I answered, "they are waiting for you to start."

"I always perspire so when I'm excited," he explained. "Keep me out of
it as much as possible."

But the next time I saw him, which was two or three days later, the
reaction had set in. He was sitting in his great library, surrounded
by books he would no more have thought of disturbing than he would of
strumming on the gorgeous grand piano inlaid with silver that ornamented
his drawing-room. A change had passed over him. His swelling rotundity,
suggestive generally of a bladder inflated to its extremest limits by
excess of self-importance, appeared to be shrinking. I put the idea
aside as mere fancy at the time, but it was fact; he became a mere bag
of bones before he died. He was wearing an old pair of carpet slippers
and smoking a short clay pipe.

"Well," I said, "everything went off all right."

"Everybody's gone off all right, so far," he grunted. He was crouching
over the fire, though the weather was still warm, one hand spread
out towards the blaze. "Now I've got to go off, that's the only thing
they're waiting for. Then everything will be in order."

"I don't think they are wanting you to go off," I answered, with a
laugh.

"You mean," he answered, "I'm the goose that lays the golden eggs. Ah,
but you see, so many of the eggs break, and so many of them are bad."

"Some of them hatch all right," I replied. The simile was becoming
somewhat confused: in conversation similes are apt to.

"If I were to die this week," he said--he paused, completing mental
calculations, "I should be worth, roughly speaking, a couple of million.
This time next year I may be owing a million."

I sat down opposite to him. "Why run risks?" I suggested. "Surely you
have enough. Why not give it up--retire?"

He laughed. "Do you think I haven't said that to myself, lad--sworn
I would a dozen times a year? I can't do it; I'm a gambler. It's the
earliest thing I can recollect doing, gambling with brace buttons. There
are men, Paul, now dying in the workhouse--me