rning to the fire and musing with his face to it,
stretched the legs of the rose-coloured Turkish trousers wide apart, and
meditatively bent his knees, as if he were going down upon them.

'You have a pair of whiskers, Lammle, which I never liked,' murmured
Fledgeby, 'and which money can't produce; you are boastful of your
manners and your conversation; you wanted to pull my nose, and you have
let me in for a failure, and your wife says I am the cause of it. I'll
bowl you down. I will, though I have no whiskers,' here he rubbed the
places where they were due, 'and no manners, and no conversation!'

Having thus relieved his noble mind, he collected the legs of the
Turkish trousers, straightened himself on his knees, and called out
to Riah in the next room, 'Halloa, you sir!' At sight of the old man
re-entering with a gentleness monstrously in contrast with the character
he had given him, Mr Fledgeby was so tickled again, that he exclaimed,
laughing, 'Good! Good! Upon my soul it is uncommon good!'

'Now, old 'un,' proceeded Fledgeby, when he had had his laugh out,
'you'll buy up these lots that I mark with my pencil--there's a tick
there, and a tick there, and a tick there--and I wager two-pence you'll
afterwards go on squeezing those Christians like the Jew you are. Now,
next you'll want a cheque--or you'll say you want it, though you've
capital enough somewhere, if one only knew where, but you'd be peppered
and salted and grilled on a gridiron before you'd own to it--and that
cheque I'll write.'

When he had unlocked a drawer and taken a key from it to open another
drawer, in which was another key that opened another drawer, in which
was another key that opened another drawer, in which was the cheque
book; and when he had written the cheque; and when, reversing the key
and drawer process, he had placed his cheque book in safety again; he
beckoned the old man, with the folded cheque, to come and take it.

'Old 'un,' said Fledgeby, when the Jew had put it in his pocketbook, and
was putting that in the breast of his outer garment; 'so much at present
for my affairs. Now a word about affairs that are not exactly mine.
Where is she?'

With his hand not yet withdrawn from the breast of his garment, Riah
started and paused.

'Oho!' said Fledgeby. 'Didn't expect it! Where have you hidden her?'

Showing that he was taken by surprise, the old man looked at his master
with some passing confusion, which the master highly en