g, tapping him on the
shoulder as they walked side by side.

'Begad it won't,' said young Barter, doing his best to make light of it.
'They've been cutting into me pretty freely this past week or two.'

'Well,' said Steinberg, puffing at his eternal cigar, and looking askant
at Barter under the light of a street-lamp which they happened to be
nearing at the moment, 'what you've got to do, you know, is to find the
man who knows Mr. Bommaney.'

The commotion which assailed Barter at this speech was like an inward
earthquake.

'What--what do you mean?' he panted.

'That's what you've got to do,' said Steinberg tranquilly.

'Do you mean to insinuate----' Barter began to bluster; but the older,
cooler, and more accomplished scoundrel stopped him contemptuously.

'You know where they are,' he said 'Why don't you get at 'em?'

VI

About noon on the following day Mr. Steinberg, seated in a small
inner chamber in Hatton Garden, leisurely answering his sole business
correspondent of that morning, was in no way surprised when the boy he
employed to open the door and receive visitors brought in a card bearing
the name of 'Mr. John Barter, jun.'

'Show him in,' said Mr. Steinberg; and young Mr. Barter, hearing this
in the outer room, came in with a pale-faced and excited alacrity. The
diamond merchant dismissed the boy with a word.

'Well,' he said, turning the tip of his cigar upwards by a protrusion of
the under lip, 'what is it?'

'About that little matter,' said young Barter nervously, 'we were
talking of last night.'

'The little matter we were talking of last night?' asked Steinberg idly,
looking at him with half-shut eyes. 'That hundred you owe me?'

'Well, perhaps that afterwards,' said Barter with a frightened
breathless laugh in his voice. 'But about the other matter first.'

'The other matter?' Steinberg asked, in a lazier manner than before.
'What other matter?' He took up his pen, dipped it in the inkstand
before him, and tracing a line or two of his correspondent's
communication with it, turned to his own unfinished letter.

Young Barter was already sufficiently agitated, and this curious
reception made him more embarrassed than ever.

'About that affair of Bommaney's,' he said, feeling as if a rapid wheel
had been somehow started in his brain.

'Ah!' said Steinberg, writing rapidly, and speaking in a voice which
seemed to indicate that he neither understood nor cared to understand,
'that a