up from his chair and walked to the window, and pulling aside
the curtain looked out on the frosty garden.

'It's going to be a bitter cold night,' he said. 'I think I will just
look in at your room again, and see if they have made up the fire
properly.'

He returned to the drawing-room and took up two or three newspapers in
turn and laid them down again, while Toffy watched him gravely.

'I 've had a bit of a jar lately,' he said at last, taking up his stand
with his back to the fire near the sofa.

'Have some dinner first,' said Toffy, 'and then we 'll go into the
matter, as I always do with my creditors. You see, if one has a cook
like Mrs. Cosby, there is an element of chance in the matter of getting
dinner at all; and another thing is it may be so bad you won't survive
it; so it's not much use being miserable before dinner, is it, when
perhaps you may be buried comfortably and respectably afterwards?'

The presence of Lydia, who listened open-mouthed to all that was said,
made conversation impossible, until at last, in an ecstasy of
importance at having broken a dessert dish, she placed the wine upon
the table and withdrew. Toffy carried the decanters into the
drawing-room, where he believed he and Peter would be more comfortable,
and having placed them on the table by the fire he congratulated his
friend that they had both survived the ordeal of dinner, and then he
suggested that Peter should tell him what was up.

'Rather a beastly thing has happened,' said Peter. He rose from the
chair where he was sitting and went and stood by the marble
mantelpiece. The black tie which he wore seemed to accentuate his
fairness, and it was a boyish, unheroic figure which leaned against the
whiteness of the marble mantelpiece as he began his puzzling tale. It
did not take very long in the telling, and until he had finished Toffy
did not speak. Indeed, there was silence for some time in the room
after Peter had done, and then, there being no necessity for much
speech or protestation between the two, Toffy said merely, 'What are
you going to do?'

'I am going to the Argentine next week,' said Peter. 'It seems proved
beyond any manner of doubt that my mother paid the passage of a woman
and a little boy to go there in the very month and in the year that my
brother was supposed to have died, and Cintra or Lisbon are the last
places where there is even the vaguest evidence of her having been seen
with two boys.'

Tof