d people
become enthusiastic over his pictures, which he thought hideous, while
they had frankly abused his furniture, which he was inclined to think
was everything that was desirable.

'There 's only one way,' he used to say hopelessly, 'in which a fellow
can know whether a thing is ugly or the reverse, and that is by fixing
a price to it. If only some one would be kind enough to stick on a lot
of labels telling me what the things are worth I should know what to
admire and what to shudder at; but, as it is, the things which I
personally like are always the things which other people abuse.'

And, alas for Sir Nigel and his lightly held treasures of art! his
pictures and the vases ranged in great glass cases in the hall were
heirlooms, and Toffy in his most impecunious days would often look at
them sadly and shake his head, murmuring to himself, 'I 'd take five
hundred pounds for the lot, and be glad to get rid of them.' There
were days when in a gentle, philosophical way he felt a positive sense
of injury in thinking of the vases behind the big glass doors, and he
would then go into intricate and complicated sums in arithmetic whereby
he could tell what it cost him per annum to look at the contents of the
cases and the old portraits in their dim frames.

This afternoon he was lying on a florid and uncomfortable-looking sofa
in a very large drawing-room, in front of a fireplace of white marble
in scroll patterns and with a fender of polished steel. It was
probably the ugliest as well as the least comfortable room in the
house, but it happened to be the only one in which there was a good
fire that afternoon; and Toffy, descending from his bedroom, weak and
ill with influenza, had come in there at two o'clock, and was now lying
down with a railway-rug placed across his feet, and his head
uncomfortably supported by a hard roller-cushion and an ornamentation
in mahogany which gracefully finished off the pattern of the
sofa-frame. Many men when they are ill take the precaution of making
their wills; Sir Nigel's preparation for a possible early demise always
took the form of elaborately and sadly adding up his accounts. He had
a large ledger beside him on the sofa, and slips of paper covered with
intricate figures which neither he nor any one else could decipher.

His faithful valet Hopwood had been dispatched to London in order to
learn chauffeur's work; for Toffy had decided, after working the matter
out to a fracti