rt, believe me! I mastered it, and,
until the end came, it was magnificent. In London and Paris to-day to
have wealth and to know how to spend it is to be the equal of princes!
The salons of the beautiful fly open before you, great men will clamour
for your friendship, all the sweetest triumphs which love and sport can
offer are yours. You stalk amongst a world of pygmies a veritable giant,
the adored of women, the envied of men! You may be old--it matters not;
ugly--you will be fooled into reckoning yourself an Adonis. Nobility
is great, art is great, genius is great, but the key to the pleasure
storehouse of the world is a key of gold--of gold!"

He broke off with a little gasp. He held his throat and looked
imploringly towards the bottle. Trent shook his head stonily. There
was something pitiful in the man's talk, in that odd mixture of bitter
cynicism and passionate earnestness, but there was also something
fascinating. As regards the brandy, however, Trent was adamant.

"Not a drop," he declared. "What a fool you are to want it, Monty!
You're a wreck already. You want to pull through, don't you? Leave the
filthy stuff alone. You'll not live a month to enjoy your coin if we get
it!"

"Live!" Monty straightened himself out. A tremor went through all his
frame.

"Live!" he repeated, with fierce contempt; "you are making the common
mistake of the whole ignorant herd. You are measuring life by its
length, when its depth alone is of any import. I want no more than a
year or two at the most, and I promise you, Mr. Scarlett Trent, my most
estimable young companion, that, during that year, I will live more than
you in your whole lifetime. I will drink deep of pleasures which you
know nothing of, I will be steeped in joys which you will never reach
more nearly than the man who watches a change in the skies or a sunset
across the ocean! To you, with boundless wealth, there will be depths of
happiness which you will never probe, joys which, if you have the wit to
see them at all, will be no more than a mirage to you."

Trent laughed outright, easily and with real mirth. Yet in his heart
were sown already the seeds of a secret dread. There was a ring of
passionate truth in Monty's words. He believed what he was saying.
Perhaps he was right. The man's inborn hatred of a second or inferior
place in anything stung him. Were there to be any niches after all in
the temple of happiness to which he could never climb? He looked ba