iating its rich natural hues of health, a kind of
grey shadow. It was as if clay was revealing itself beneath faded paint.
He did not lift his eyes.

Thorpe had been prepared to hail this consummation of his trick with
boisterous and scornful mirth. Even while the victim was deciphering the
fatal paper, he had restrained with impatience the desire to burst
out into bitter laughter. But now there was something in the aspect of
Plowden's collapse which seemed to forbid triumphant derision. He was
taking his blow so like a gentleman,--ashen-pale and quivering, but
clinging to a high-bred dignity of silence,--that the impulse to exhibit
equally good manners possessed Thorpe upon the instant.

"Well--you see how little business you've got, setting yourself to buck
against a grown-up man."

He offered the observation in the tone of the school-teacher, affectedly
philosophical but secretly jubilant, who harangues a defeated and
humiliated urchin upon his folly.

"Oh, chuck it!" growled Lord Plowden, staring still at the calamitous
paper.

Thorpe accepted in good part the intimation that silence was after all
most decorous. He put his feet up on the corner of the desk, and tipping
back his chair, surveyed the discomfited Viscount impassively. He
forbore even to smile.

"So this swine of a Tavender came straight to you!" Lord Plowden had
found words at last. As he spoke, he lifted his face, and made a show of
looking the other in the eye.

"Oh, there are a hundred things in your own game, even, that you haven't
an inkling of," Thorpe told him, lightly. "I've been watching every move
you've made, seeing further ahead in your own game than you did. Why, it
was too easy! It was like playing draughts with a girl. I knew you would
come today, for example. I told the people out there that I expected
you."

"Yes-s," said the other, with rueful bewilderment. "You seem to have
been rather on the spot--I confess."

"On the spot? All over the place!" Thorpe lifted himself slightly in his
chair, and put more animation into his voice.

"It's the mistake you people make!" he declared oracularly. "You think
that a man can come into the City without a penny, and form great
combinations and carry through a great scheme, and wage a fight with the
smartest set of scoundrels on the London Stock Exchange and beat 'em,
and make for himself a big fortune--and still be a fool! You imagine
that a man like that can be played with, and hoodwi