said Ezra shortly. "Burt and I have had no
luncheon yet."

"I am cursed near starved," the other growled, throwing himself into a
chair. Ezra had been careful to keep him from drink on the way down,
and he was now sober, or as nearly sober as a brain saturated with
liquor could ever be.

Girdlestone called for Mrs. Jorrocks, who laid the cloth and put a piece
of cold corned beef and a jug of beer upon the table. Ezra appeared to
have a poor appetite, but Burt ate voraciously, and filled his glass
again and again from the jug. When the meal was finished and the ale
all consumed, he rose with a grunt of repletion, and, pulling a roll of
black tobacco from his pocket, proceeded to cut it into slices, and to
cram it into his pipe. Ezra drew a chair up to the fire, and his father
did the same, after ordering the old woman out of the room and carefully
closing the door behind her.

"You have spoken to our friend here about the business?" Girdlestone
asked, nodding his head in the direction of Burt.

"Yes. I have made it all clear."

"Five hundred pounds down, and a free passage to Africa," said Burt.

"An energetic man like you can do a great deal in the colonies with five
hundred pounds," Girdlestone remarked.

"What I do with it is nothin' to you, guv'nor," Burt remarked surlily.
"I does the job, you pays the money, and there's an end as far as you
are concerned."

"Quite so," the merchant said in a conciliatory voice. "You are free to
do what you like with the money."

"Without axin' your leave," growled Burt. He was a man of such a
turbulent and quarrelsome disposition that he was always ready to go out
of his way to make himself disagreeable.

"The question is how it is to be done," interposed Ezra. He was looking
very nervous and uneasy. Hard as he was, he had neither the
pseudo-religious monomania of his father, nor the callous brutality of
Burt, and he shuddered at the thought of what was to come. His eyes
were red and bleared, and he sat with one arm thrown over the back of
his chair, while he drummed nervously with the fingers of his other hand
upon his knee. "You've got some plan in your head, I suppose," he said
to his father. "It's high time the thing was carried through, or we
shall have to put up the shutters in Fenchurch Street."

His father shivered at the very thought. "Anything rather than that,"
he said.

"It will precious soon come to that. It was the devil of a fight to
kee