wn directly," said the servant.

"Do you?" said Cassis and that was all.

A precise, erect, parchmentlike person was Nugent Cassis, entirely
colourless in himself and his outlook. The emotions of life never for
an instant affected him. He was apparently insensible to pain,
passion, triumph and disaster. His brain worked at one unvarying speed
with clocklike regularity. He was always efficient, he was never
inspired. He believed in himself and his judgments and doubted
everyone else and their judgments. He was a machine, self-contrived,
for the purpose of making money, which he had no capacity for spending.
He could carry in his head the entire overnight market quotations and
invariably did so. He seldom made a mistake and never admitted the
mistakes he made. His transactions were honest because his knowledge
of the law was unrivalled and he knew to a hair how close to the wind a
man might sail. As he never wasted a moment he occupied the time of
waiting, in ringing up his broker and firing a barrage of instructions.
This done he returned to the fireplace, consulted his own watch,
corrected the mantelpiece clock which was a minute and a half slow,
sniffed critically and proceeded to warm his hands again. There was
nothing spontaneous in the action, warming his hands was as much a part
of his daily programme as reading the _Financial Times_, the two
minutes he spent lying flat on his back after lunch, or the single
round of golf which he played every third Sunday throughout the year.

The clock was striking eleven when Mr. Hilbert Torrington, a bent,
bald, clean shaven man of eighty years, entered on the arm of the
servant. Mr. Torrington, his age claims the prefix, was a different
type to Cassis. He possessed a pair of blue eyes that might have
belonged to a child and the expression of his face, a face threaded
with a thousand wrinkles, was sweet and calm. People who saw him but
had no intimate knowledge of his powers, marvelled that this frail,
kindly, stooping old man, with his look of innocence that was almost
sublime, could in reality be a giant in the world of money. Such was
the case. Mr. Hilbert Torrington had his fingers on the financial
pulse of the world and at a pressure could accelerate or decelerate it,
to suit his mood. Unlike Cassis, Mr. Torrington had time for
everything. When he worked he worked instantaneously, achieving in an
hour work that would have kept a less remarkable man busy