n impulsive person.

"I confess that I can't understand his motive," I exclaimed.

"This is exactly what John wondered at, at first," said Mrs. Fyne. By
that time an intimacy--if not exactly confidence--had sprung up between
us which permitted her in this discussion to refer to her husband as
John. "You know he had not opened his lips all that time," she pursued.
"I don't blame his restraint. On the contrary. What could he have said?
I could see he was observing the man very thoughtfully."

"And so, Mr. Fyne listened, observed and meditated," I said. "That's an
excellent way of coming to a conclusion. And may I ask at what
conclusion he had managed to arrive? On what ground did he cease to
wonder at the inexplicable? For I can't admit humanity to be the
explanation. It would be too monstrous."

It was nothing of the sort, Mrs. Fyne assured me with some resentment, as
though I had aspersed little Fyne's sanity. Fyne very sensibly had set
himself the mental task of discovering the self-interest. I should not
have thought him capable of so much cynicism. He said to himself that
for people of that sort (religious fears or the vanity of righteousness
put aside) money--not great wealth, but money, just a little money--is
the measure of virtue, of expediency, of wisdom--of pretty well
everything. But the girl was absolutely destitute. The father was in
prison after the most terribly complete and disgraceful smash of modern
times. And then it dawned upon Fyne that this was just it. The great
smash, in the great dust of vanishing millions! Was it possible that
they all had vanished to the last penny? Wasn't there, somewhere,
something palpable; some fragment of the fabric left?

"That's it," had exclaimed Fyne, startling his wife by this explosive
unseating of his lips less than half an hour after the departure of de
Barral's cousin with de Barral's daughter. It was still in the dining-
room, very near the time for him to go forth affronting the elements in
order to put in another day's work in his country's service. All he
could say at the moment in elucidation of this breakdown from his usual
placid solemnity was:

"The fellow imagines that de Barral has got some plunder put away
somewhere."

This being the theory arrived at by Fyne, his comment on it was that a
good many bankrupts had been known to have taken such a precaution. It
was possible in de Barral's case. Fyne went so far in his display o