millionaire, he had been able to think of nothing better than
that it should send old Kervick to him, to help beguile his boredom with
dominoes and mess-room stories! Pah! He was disgusted with himself.

Striking out a new course, with the Monument as his guide, he presently
came into a part of the City which had a certain familiarity for him.
He walked up St. Swithin's Lane, looking at the strange forms of foreign
fruit exposed at the shop-doors, and finding in them some fleeting
recurrence of the hint that travel was what he needed. Then he stopped,
to look through the railings and open gateway at an enclosure on the
left, and the substantial, heavily-respectable group of early Victorian
buildings beyond. Some well-dressed men were standing talking in one of
the porches. The stiff yellowish-stucco pilasters of this entrance, and
the tall uniformed figure of the porter in the shadow, came into the
picture as he observed it; they gave forth a suggestion of satisfied
smugness--of orderly but altogether unillumined routine. Nothing could
be more commonplace to the eye.

Yet to his imagination, eighteen months before, what mysterious marvels
of power had lurked hidden behind those conventional portals! Within
those doors, in some inner chamber, sat men whose task it was to direct
the movements of the greatest force the world had ever known. They and
their cousins in Paris and Frankfort, or wherever they lived, between
them wielded a vaster authority than all the Parliaments of the earth.
They could change a government, or crush the aspirations of a whole
people, or decide a question of peace or war, by the silent dictum of
their little family council. He remembered now how he had stood on this
same spot, and stared with fascinated gaze at this quadrangle of dull
houses, and pondered upon what it must feel like to be a Rothschild--and
that was only a little over a year ago!

There was no sense of fascination whatever in his present gaze. He found
himself regarding instead, with a kind of detached curiosity, the
little knot of men in frock-coats and silk-hats who stood talking in the
doorway. It was barely ten o'clock, yet clearly business was proceeding
within. One of these persons whom he beheld might be a Rothschild, for
aught he knew; at any rate, it was presumable that some of them were
on the premises. He had heard it said that the very head of the house
listened to quotations from the tape while he ate his luncheon,