ple of hours he would sun himself
in the smiles of his adored mistress, and listen to the prattle of his
other friend, Emmy. Mrs. Oldrieve would be knitting by the lamp, and
probably he would hold her wool, drop it, and be scolded as if he were a
member of the family; all of which was a very gracious thing to the
sensitive, lonely man, warming his heart and expanding his nature. It
filled his head with dreams: of a woman dwelling by right in this house of
his, and making the air fragrant by her presence. But as the
woman--although he tried his utmost to prevent it and to conjure up the
form of a totally different type--took the shape of Zora Middlemist, he
discouraged such dreams as making more for mild unhappiness than for joy,
and bent his thoughts to his guns and railway carriages and other
world-upheaving inventions. The only thing that caused him any uneasiness
was an overdraft at his bank due to cover which he had to pay on shares
purchased for him by a circularizing bucket-shop keeper. It had seemed so
simple to write Messrs. Shark & Co., or whatever alias the philanthropic
financier assumed, a check for a couple of hundred pounds, and receive
Messrs. Shark's check for two thousand in a fortnight, that he had
wondered why other people did not follow this easy road to fortune.
Perhaps they did, he reflected: that was how they managed to keep a large
family of daughters and a motor car. But when the shark conveyed to him in
unintelligible terms the fact that unless he wrote a check for two or three
hundred pounds more his original stake would be lost, and when these also
fell through the bottomless bucket of Messrs. Shark & Co. and his bankers
called his attention to an overdrawn account, it began to dawn upon him
that these were not the methods whereby a large family of daughters and a
motor car were unprecariously maintained. The loss did not distress him to
the point of sleeplessness; his ideas as to the value of money were as
vague as his notions on the rearing of babies; but he was publishing his
book at his own expense, and was concerned at not being in a position to
pay the poor publisher immediately.

At Mrs. Oldrieve's he found his previsions nearly all fulfilled. Zora, with
a sofa-ful of railway time-tables and ocean-steamer handbooks, sought his
counsel as to a voyage round the world which she had in contemplation; Mrs.
Oldrieve impressed on his memory a recipe for an omelette which he was to
convey verba