must come down and stay with us soon. Janet told me to give you her love, and ask you to fix a date. I am very glad you called. Give my love to May when you see her to-night. And, Jimmy," he hesitated a little, "of course it is not for me to advise you; but I do wish you would reconsider that decision of yours. It's a most precarious calling, most precarious, and, I am afraid, one full of temptations." There was perfectly genuine concern in his voice, and yet, within a couple of minutes, Jimmy and his affairs were clean out of his mind, and he was deep in the business of his client.

Jimmy lighted a cigarette on the landing outside his brother's office; but neither the tobacco, nor the drink he had a few minutes later, could alleviate his sense of disappointment. He was a very lonely man.

CHAPTER IV

The Marlow motor-car, large and luxurious, with red panels and an expensive alien chauffeur, met Jimmy at the station. Mrs. Marlow hurried down to the hall as she heard the throbbing of the engine outside the front door, and greeted her brother with emotion which verged on tears.

"I am very glad to see you again, Jimmy, dear," she said, kissing him a second time. "And Henry, too, is delighted to have you. Of course, you have grown a great deal older, but I don't know that you have changed very much." She scrutinised his face, then noted, with something akin to dismay, that his clothes, though well cut, were neither new nor fashionable.

Jimmy, on his part, was trying to readjust his ideas. He had been picturing May as still rather rosy and inclined to plumpness, essentially suggestive of good nature and repose; now, he saw her thin, almost angular, a little hard of feature, though retaining some of her good looks. In his calculations, he had forgotten the four children she had brought into the world since he had seen her last.

May asked him a number of questions about himself, his health, and his doings, hardly waiting for his answers before passing on to something, fresh, and hardly listening when she did allow him time to reply; then—

"I'll take you up to your room," she said. "Your trunks have gone up already. I have had to give you one of the smaller spare rooms, because my sister-in-law will be back to-night—you remember Laura, of course—and there may be someone else coming to-morrow." At the door of his room she paused. "Dinner is at half-past seven. We always dress, but don't you trouble, if you would rather not, or, or——" She stammered a little.

Jimmy understood. "I always retained my suit through all my ups and downs," he said with a smile. "It is the one absolute essential. It will get you credit when nothing else will. Many a time I have gone to an hotel with only the suit and a lot of old newspapers in my trunk, and not five dollars in my pocket."

Mrs. Marlow did not smile. Instead, she looked as she felt, shocked and pained; and as she went downstairs she was casting round for some scheme to stop Jimmy's flow of reminiscences. It would never do for him to talk in that way before people like the Graylings or the Bashfords; whilst, if the servants were to hear him, it would be all round the neighbourhood in a couple of days that Mrs. Marlow's brother was, or had been, a penniless adventurer.

Jimmy did not come down till the dinner gong went; consequently, after he had shaken hands with Henry Marlow, they went straight into the dining-room, and May lost her chance of saying anything.

Marlow himself was hungry and ate heartily, and the guest was distinctly tired, thanks to Douglas Kelly; as a result, there was little said during the first three courses, except by Mrs. Marlow, who gave her husband a full account of all her own and the children's doings for that day, and the names of the people on whom she had called, and of other visitors whom she had met at their houses. Once or twice she tried to include Jimmy in the conversation, by asking if he did not remember this one or that, friends she had known before she was married; but, in every case, they were merely names to him; they had all been grown up when he was still at school, and now, after having forgotten their very existence for ten years, he could not feel the slightest interest in them.

After a while, Marlow, having taken the edge off his appetite, asked him a few questions about his wanderings, but paid little heed to his answers. Even when Jimmy told, in his essentially picturesque way, the story of John Locke's death, his brother-in-law merely remarked that such things were never allowed to occur in the British Empire, though, doubtless, they were to be expected under governments which had injured the market so greatly in the past by repudiating their bargains. Their debased silver currency and their worthless paper money were an absolute scandal, he added.

May, on her part, gave a little gasp when told of the end of Locke's slayer; then, looking up, and seeing the parlour-maid standing open-mouthed, with a sauce-boat balanced on a tray at a most dangerous angle, she felt it was time to intervene.

"Please don't give us any more horrors, Jimmy. We are not used to them here. Mary," severely, to the parlour-maid, "the master's plate."

Jimmy flushed and said no more; and, apparently, they were perfectly content that it should be so, for the subject of his travels dropped, and was not resumed, either then or afterwards. He saw that they were not interested, even though they were his own people; and he listened in silence when his sister went back to the apparently inexhaustible subject of their friends. Certainly, whilst they sat smoking after dinner, Henry Marlow did ask his guest some more questions, a great many more in fact, and listened with considerable attention to the replies; but, as Jimmy noted with a kind of grim amusement, they were all of an impersonal nature, having reference solely to mining conditions in South American states. Jimmy's own experiences at the hands of Dago patriots left his brother-in-law unmoved, being things which belonged rather to books, and certainly had no part in the lives of people of position; but the effect of those same patriots' doings on the development of the country, and, consequently, on the profits of British Enterprise, aroused his bitterest wrath. Once, some years before, he had lost over a thousand pounds through a new president revoking a lead-mining concession which his predecessor had granted; and, that predecessor having been sent where neither letters nor writs could reach him, none of the purchase money had been recovered despite the efforts of the Foreign Office. Mr. Marlow, himself, had never forgiven either the Dagos or the diplomatists, especially as the concession had eventually gone to a German firm, which had made a clear half-million out of it; and he argued, not without reason, that the most effective form of negotiation would have been a whiff of grapeshot, or its modern equivalent, from the guns of a British cruiser.

Jimmy listened patiently to the grievance, which took some time in the telling, involving, as it did, full details of the careers and financial standing of the directors of the ill-fated company, men of position and weight in the City, who deserved very different treatment.

"Disgraceful business, disgraceful," Henry added. "To think that the British Government should allow us to be robbed by a snuff-coloured rascal like that. Did you ever come across him?"

"Who? President Montez?" Jimmy laughed apologetically. "I'm very sorry; but I helped him with that revolution. I was pretty hard up at the time, and I knew something about field