his evil plight.

Presently she addressed him.

"Mr. Trent!"

He turned round and looked at her.

"Is it necessary for me to remind you, I wonder," she said, "that it is
usual to address a few remarks--quite as a matter of form, you know--to
the woman whom you bring in to dinner?"

He eyed her dispassionately.

"I am not used to making conversation," he said. "Is there anything in
the world which I could talk about likely to interest you?"

She took a salted almond from a silver dish by his side and smiled
sweetly upon him. "Dear me!" she said, "how fierce! Don't attempt it
if you feel like that, please! What have you been doing since I saw you
last?--losing your money or your temper, or both?"

He looked at her with a curiously grim smile.

"If I lost the former," he said, "I should very soon cease to be a
person of interest, or of any account at all, amongst your friends."

She shrugged her shoulders.

"You do not strike one," she remarked, "as the sort of person likely to
lose a fortune on the race-course."

"You are quite right," he answered, "I think that I won money. A couple
of thousand at least."

"Two thousand pounds!" She actually sighed, and lost her appetite for
the oyster patty with which she had been trifling. Trent looked around
the table.

"At the same time," he continued in a lower key, "I'll make a confession
to you, Miss Wendermott, I wouldn't care to make to any one else here.
I've been pretty lucky as you know, made money fast--piled it up in
fact. To-day, for the first time, I have come face to face with the
possibility of a reverse."

"Is this a new character?" she murmured. "Are you becoming
faint-hearted?"

"It is no ordinary reverse," he said slowly. "It is
collapse--everything!"

"O--oh!"

She looked at him attentively. Her own heart was beating. If he had
not been engrossed by his care lest any one might over-hear their
conversation, he would have been astonished at the change in her face.

"You are talking in enigmas surely," she said. "Nothing of that sort
could possibly happen to you. They tell me that the Bekwando Land shares
are priceless, and that you must make millions."

"This afternoon," he said, raising his glass to his lips and draining
it, "I think that I must have dozed upon the lawn at Ascot. I sat there
for some time, back amongst the trees, and I think that I must have
fallen to sleep. There was a whisper in my ears and I saw myself
stripped of ever