g to
say--almost offensive, dash it! But then, for that matter, everything
was rum of late--so _that_ counted for nothing. Fact was, it just seemed
to me like there was something in the air--everybody seemed so
queer--well, jolly muddled, I should call it! Idea had been gradually
coming to me that I was the only one who appeared to have any clear
understanding of things; and somehow the realization just made me
devilish nervous--the responsibility, don't you know!

And just then the judge looked suddenly at his watch, muttered
something, and hitched up to the table strewn with papers. He bent over
these with a frown, coughed oddly, glanced at me--and bent again with a
mutter. Of course, I saw he was annoyed over sudden consciousness of the
break he had made, and was striving to cover his embarrassment.

And, by Jove, it seemed to me he _ought_ to _feel_ embarrassed, for the
very rummest thing yet was this crazy infatuation for this infernal
chauffeur. It was pitiful--oh, disgusting, if you ask _me_--and the more
so because it was something she did not share. I _knew_ she didn't, you
know! No, it was plain enough, dash it, that between her father and this
mucker of a chauffeur, my poor darling was being crowded to the
what's-its-name. _This_ was what she had meant--had hinted at--and, by
Jove, I was ready to wager anything on it; eager to put up all I was
worth, you know!

Didn't know, dash it, how much I _was_ worth Went down in Wall Street
one day and asked old Morley, my man of affairs, but forgot what he
said. Never could remember afterward whether it was one million or ten
and always hated to ask again.

Truth was he had stared at me so and seemed so oddly surprised, I just
worked off some jolly apologetic rubbish and got out. Pugsley thought I
must have violated some rotten, silly law of commercial ethics--that
sort of thing, you know; declared that his attorney had had the dashed
impertinence once to ask him about some investments, so he got another
man and gave him a power of what's-its-name. Never was bothered now, he
said, by checks or reports or any boring distractions of that sort;
_this_ man just kept him supplied with money, and once in a while he
scrawled his name on something--all he had to do. Devilish simple, you
see, but then Pugsley is so ingenious, so--oh, _clever_, you know.

"H'm!" coughed the judge, "Er--h'm!" And I stopped snapping the cover of
my cigarette case, thinking he was about to say