still,
making all allowances for native vanity in concealment and addition,
he was distinctly funny--he represented the matter for once in its
ludicrous rather than in its disastrous aspect. He observed also,
looking around the table, that after all he had lost less by
Colonel Clay in four years of persecution than he often lost by
one injudicious move in a single day on the London Stock Exchange;
while he seemed to imply to the solid men of New York, that he
would cheerfully sacrifice such a fleabite as that, in return for
the amusement and excitement of the chase which the Colonel had
afforded him.

The poet was pleased. "You are a man of spirit, Sir Charles," he
said. "I love to see this fine old English admiration of pluck and
adventure! The fellow must really have some good in him, after all.
I should like to take notes of a few of those stories; they would
supply nice material for basing a romance upon."

"I hardly know whether I'm exactly the man to make the hero of a
novel," Charles murmured, with complacence. And he certainly didn't
look it.

"_I_ was thinking rather of Colonel Clay as the hero," the poet
responded coldly.

"Ah, that's the way with you men of letters," Charles answered,
growing warm. "You always have a sneaking sympathy with the rascals."

"That may be better," Coleyard retorted, in an icy voice, "than
sympathy with the worst forms of Stock Exchange speculation."

The company smiled uneasily. The railway king wriggled. Wrengold
tried to change the subject hastily. But Charles would not be put
down.

"You must hear the end, though," he said. "That's not quite the
worst. The meanest thing about the man is that he's also a
hypocrite. He wrote me _such_ a letter at the end of his last
trick--here, positively here, in America." And he proceeded to give
his own version of the Quackenboss incident, enlivened with sundry
imaginative bursts of pure Vandrift fancy.

When Charles spoke of Mrs. Quackenboss the poet smiled. "The worst
of married women," he said, "is--that you can't marry them; the
worst of unmarried women is--that they want to marry you." But when
it came to the letter, the poet's eye was upon my brother-in-law.
Charles, I must fain admit, garbled the document sadly. Still, even
so, some gleam of good feeling remained in its sentences. But
Charles ended all by saying, "So, to crown his misdemeanours, the
rascal shows himself a whining cur and a disgusting Pharisee."

"Don't yo