deuced casual sort of husband. Bad form, you know!"

Good form and bad form were the foot-rules by which he measured mankind.

Olive bit her lip. It galled her pride that Clifford should not be early on the platform to see to her comforts. The attentions of her father and maid did not satisfy her; she wanted Clifford to be there to fetch and carry for her.

Pride was the keynote of her character. It was pride and not love that had decided her, five years before, to marry the financier. She had admired the way in which he had slashed out for himself his place in the world of London and Paris finance, from his humble beginning as a clerk in a Montreal broker's office. It ministered to her pride to be the wife of a man who had plucked success from the whirlpool of life. As to the methods by which he had amassed his money, with these she was not concerned. She knew, of course, that there were many who had bitter things to say about his methods.

"Probably it's his brother who's delayed him," said Olive, looking for an explanation which would salve her amour propre. "They both seem to be crazy over their rubbishy scientific experiments."

"Who's this brother?"

"I know scarcely anything about him. His name's Rivière—he's a half-brother. He turns up unexpectedly from the wilds of Canada, and lives like a hermit, so Clifford tells me, in some tumbledown villa outside Paris."

"What's he like?"

"I've never seen him."

"What's the scientific experiment?"

"Clifford told me something about it, but I forgot. I wasn't interested in the slightest. No money in it, I could see at once. I told Clifford so."

Sir Francis tugged at his watch impatiently. "He'll miss this train for certain!"

"No; there he is!"

Matheson was striding rapidly through the press of people on the platform. He quickly caught sight of his wife and father-in-law, and came up with a gesture of apology.

"Sorry I'm so late. Very sorry, too, I shan't be able to travel with you to-night."

"Experiment to finish?" queried Olive, with an unconcealed note of contempt in her voice.

"A very important business engagement for this evening. Will you excuse me? I can follow to-morrow."

"Can't it wait?"

"It's highly important."

"There's the 'phone to speak over."

"I have to come face to face with my man. Surely, Olive, you can spare me for a day? Have you everything you want for the journey?"

"Who is the man?"

"Lars Larssen," answered Matheson. He lowered his voice slightly, though on the bustling railway platform there was no likelihood of anyone listening to the conversation.

Sir Francis nodded his head. He was heavily interested in company-promoting himself, as a means of swelling an inadequate property income, and Lars Larssen was a magic name.

"Hudson Bay scheme?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Well, business before pleasure," he remarked sententiously.

Olive cut in with a question. "Have you finished your experiments with your brother?"

"No," answered Matheson evenly.

"When will they be finished?"

"I can't say. There's a great deal to be discussed and planned."

"Then bring him with you to-morrow. You can plan together whatever it is you have to plan at Monte. Besides, I want to see him."

"John is a busy man," protested Matheson. "I don't think he can leave his laboratory."

"Give him my invitation, and make it a pressing one," pursued Olive, careless of anything but her own whim. "Tell him—tell him I particularly want him to explain his experiments to me himself."

At this moment the little horn of departure sounded its quaint note from the end of the platform, and a porter hurried to lock the door of the wagon-lit.

"Have you everything you want for the journey?" asked Matheson.

"I have everything I want," replied his wife coldly. "My father has seen to that.... Good-bye."

She did not offer to kiss him, and he for his part drew back into a shell of reserve. Many thoughts were buzzing through his mind as they exchanged the commonplaces of a railway station good-bye from either side of a compartment window.

Olive's last words were: "Remember, I'm expecting you to bring your brother with you to-morrow."

A very tired look was in Matheson's eyes, and a weary droop on his shoulders, as the train pulled out and he was left alone on the platform.

Two Frenchmen whispered to one another about him. "The milord Matheson, see you! The very rich milord Matheson."

"Ah, if I were only a rich man too!"

"What would you do?"

"I should spend. How I should spend!" He licked his lips at the thought of the pleasures of body that money could buy him.

"I should save," said the other. "I should make myself the richest man in the world. That would be glorious!"

These last words reached the ears of Matheson, and set up a curious train of thought as he drove in his cab to his office in the Rue Laffitte. The words carried him back to a forest-clearing in the backwoods of Ontario, where he and his half-brother had made holiday camp some eighteen years before. They were comparing ambitions—two young men unusually alike in features but very different in temperament and will-power. John Rivière, the elder of the two, was dreaming of fame in the paths of science—he had worked his way through M'Gill University and was hoping for a demonstratorship to keep him in living expenses. Clifford Matheson, a clerk in a broker's office, planned his life in terms of cities and money. "To make big money—that's what I call success."

In the rapids of the stream by their feet was a swirl of waters covering a sunken rock, and Rivière had thrown on to it a chip of wood. The chip was whirled round and round, nearer and nearer to the centre, until finally it was sucked under with a sudden extinguishment.

"There's the life you plan," he had said to Clifford....

CHAPTER II
A £5,000,000 DEAL

When Matheson reached his office, he was told by a clerk that Mr Lars Larssen was already waiting to see him. He threw off his gloves and fur-lined coat and adjusted the lights before he answered that his visitor could be shown in. He added that the clerk could lock up his own rooms and leave, as he would not be wanted any longer that evening.

There was a quiet simplicity in Matheson's office that one would scarcely associate with the operations of high finance. One might have looked for costly furnishings and an atmosphere redolent of big money. Yet here was a simple rosewood desk with a bowl of mimosa on it, and around the walls were a few simple landscapes from recent salons.

If Lars Larssen were a magic name to Sir Francis Letchmere, it was a magic name also to many other men of affairs. From cabin-boy to millionaire shipowner was his story in brief. But that does not tell one quarter. The son of Scandinavian immigrants to the States, factory-workers, he had run away to sea at the age of fourteen, with the call of the ocean ringing in his ears from the Viking inheritance that was his. But on this was superposed the fierce desire for success that formed the psychical atmosphere of the new American environment. As a boy in the smoke-blackened factory town, he had breathed in the longing to make money—big money—to use men to his own ends, to be a master of masters.

With precocious insight he quickly learnt that money is made not by those who go out upon the waters, but by those who