with the familiar grey eyes, dusty hair and capacious loose-lipped mouth, that Guy Bannerman had discovered America and was concerned to solve the negro problem. He was on his way to Klondike, where he heard that gold had been found, and he swore me impressively to secrecy.

"Half New York knows about it already," I had to warn him.

"How did they hear?" he roared.

"You've just told them."

The three of us lunched together, and I found that Grayle, too, was bound for the gold-fields. Their methods of approach were notably different, for, while Guy Bannerman informed New York City that any fool could dig for gold and I retorted that every fool would, Grayle was compiling an exhaustive list of everything that a gold-digger could need or be drugged into thinking he needed.

"One wants a pick and shovel, I suppose," Guy ventured, "and—and a pannikin." His conception of gold-digging impressed me as being literary.

"And food, drink, lights, clothes, covering, cooking-gear, medicine——" Grayle struck in ferociously. "No, we're not going to discover the North West Passage, but we're going to make these swine squeal—and the more squeals we knock out of them the better I shall be pleased. Tools, blankets—or rather, sleeping-bags. Tents. Tobacco. Mustn't forget tobacco. Bags for the gold. I suppose, if you've had a good day, you sleep with a revolver under your pillow; and stand drinks all round, which involves the worst obtainable Californian gooseberry. I'm going to supply the outfit, and they're going to dig the gold. Exploit, or be exploited. Care to come in with us, Stornaway? Anything you like to put up, you know...."

He could not persuade me to come and help him exploit, nor could he save Bannerman from being exploited, but the enterprise as he saw and planned it was a giant success even in the history of gold-rushes. I believe Aylmer Lancing supplied the capital; Grayle reached Klondike a week after the rush had begun and only came east when it was starkly not worth his while to be left with a month's stores on his hands; then the insalubrious shanty known as "Grayle's Hotel" was sold by private treaty, the stock-in-trade was put up to auction on a rising market and he returned to square his accounts with Lancing in New York.

However much money he made, I dare swear that he returned with even more experience. For many months many thousands of the world's choicest blackguards had slept between his blankets, worked with his tools, eaten his food and sheltered beneath his roofs. Raving with his Californian gooseberry champagne, a Pittsburg smelter had emptied one of his six-shooters into the scattering head of his partner; Grayle sold the coffin and subsequently a coil of rope. He supplied jewellery and dresses to the women whom he had induced to follow the camp; he peddled concertinas to the musically-minded. Twice the store was looted, after a good day and a full dinner, which the looting party instinctively felt to have been insufficiently full. The first time he convened a public meeting and asked if it was in the common interest to make him close down; the second time he began to pack and only unpacked when the leader had been unobtrusively lynched. As a study in contrasts, Guy Bannerman spent three months carrying the gold south and bringing back stores; then he tired of the only work for which he was fit, pocketed his share of the profits and started digging. The profits were coaxed out of him by a woman whom he set himself to reclaim—without noticeable success—and, whereas the gold began to peter out within a month of Grayle's departure, Bannerman stayed on until his last dollar had passed to the new proprietor of "Grayle's Hotel."

I met both adventurers in Venezuela, which they had to leave before their scheduled time, and again at Colon. Then I returned to England and got myself elected to the House of Commons for the Southdown division of Sussex; I did not see Grayle again until the 1900 election brought him into the House, with Guy Bannerman faithfully running the election and later acting as secretary, shadow, press-cutting agency, collector of statistics, fact-finder and general parliamentary devil. Then he went out to South Africa for the second half of the war.

Having seen the man undisguised in two continents, I have always been a little surprised to find how little he was known here; he can be a very entertaining ruffian, causing the usually censorious to apologise and say "a blackguard, but at least he's not a hypocrite, you know;" on the other hand, through the rose-tinted spectacles of middle-age I seem to look back on a House of Commons which would not have tolerated him; perhaps we are more indulgent nowadays, perhaps no one took the trouble to compile a dossier, perhaps each man felt that his own turn might come next.

Be that as it may, Grayle succeeded in entering a House that neither liked nor trusted him. Fishing in troubled waters for twelve years, he picked up a knowledge of his colleagues, even if he landed no fish; speculation in countries too enterprising to be critical had made him rich enough to pay other people's debts and occasionally to compensate lost honour on behalf of some rising politician with a reputation to preserve, but he never came into the open until the Marconi enquiry, when I discovered by the savagery of his attacks on the Government that he was now a newspaper proprietor. The war gave him his opportunity, and, according to the far from impartial statement of Bertrand Oakleigh, who liked an actionable story for its own sake, Grayle was one of the leaders in organising the Unionist attack on the Liberal Government in 1915.

All this and more I contrived to convey to Pentyre before Grayle had finished his cigar and signified his willingness to come upstairs.

We were hardly inside the drawing-room before he had limped briskly to the sofa where the young bride who had been his neighbour at dinner was seated; she smiled easily, ungratified but obviously conscious of his admiration, and in a moment they were splashing to the waist in vivacious badinage. I sought out my niece and tried to secure ten minutes' quiet discussion of my own affairs.

In one of the first letters to reach me in my internment camp Yolande cautiously prepared me for bad news; on the next page she announced young Deryk Lancing's death; a week later I heard—in my loose-box and amid a smell of straw and whitewash—that the whole estate of some twenty odd millions had passed to me. I had known old Sir Aylmer Lancing, the boy's father, ever since I was transferred from Vienna to Washington, when he was in the fulness of his powers and Deryk was unborn. Indeed, he had hitched me out of the Diplomatic and given me a start with one of his own firms of contractors in South America, and there I had made enough money to retire to affluence when my health broke down in Panama. I had seen him, too, regularly and intimately for fifteen years after his stroke; indeed, I had induced my brother to sell him Ripley Court and I spent so much of my time there that it was sometimes hard to believe that the great, gaunt house had ever changed hands. Deryk I had known since he was a boy of eight or nine, brilliant and precocious, neurotic, impatient and inconsiderate, but winning and lovable with it all and filled with a blaze of promise. He had succeeded to the title and estate less than twelve months before he was killed; he had just become engaged rather romantically to a girl with whom he had long been in love; and it was on the day when he had been shewing her the house which I persuaded him to buy and which was waiting for them both that he had fallen from the roof and been picked up dead and hideously broken....

I looked round the room, through the rich gleam of Lady Maitland's red