IT may be that every other passenger in that morning train to London nursed either a silent rage, or declaimed aloud to fellow-sufferers in indignation, at the time consumed in making what, by the map, should be so brief a journey. In Thorpe\'s own compartment, men spoke with savage irony of cyclists alleged to be passing them on the road, and exchanged dark prophecies as to the novelties in imbecility and helplessness which the line would be preparing for the Christmas holidays. The old joke about people who had gone travelling years before, and were believed to be still lost somewhere in the recesses of Kent, revived itself amid gloomy approbation. The still older discussion as to whether the South Eastern or the Brighton was really the worst followed naturally in its wake, and occupied its accustomed half-hour—complicated, however, upon this occasion, by the chance presence of a loquacious stranger who said he lived on the Chatham-and-Dover, and who rejected boisterously the idea that any other railway could be half so bad.

The intrusion of this outsider aroused instant resentment, and the champions of the South Eastern and the Brighton, having piled up additional defenses in the shape of personal recollections of delay and mismanagement quite beyond belief, made a combined attack upon the newcomer. He was evidently incapable, their remarks implied, of knowing a bad railway when he saw one. To suggest that the characterless and inoffensive Chatham-and-Dover, so commonplace in its tame virtues, was to be mentioned in the same breath with the daringly inventive and resourceful malefactors whose rendezvous was London Bridge, showed either a weak mind or a corrupt heart. Did this man really live on the Dover line at all? Angry countenances plainly reflected the doubt.

But to Thorpe the journey seemed short enough—almost too short. The conversation interested him not at all; if he had ever known the Southern lines apart, they were all one to him now. He looked out of the window, and could have sworn that he thought of nothing but the visit from which he was returning.

When he alighted at Cannon Street, however, it was to discover that his mind was full of a large, new, carefully-prepared project. It came to him, ready-made and practically complete, as he stood on the platform, superintending the porter\'s efforts to find his bags. He turned it over and over in his thoughts, in the hansom, more to familiarize himself with its details than to add to them. He left the cab to wait for him at the mouth of a little alley which delves its way into Old Broad Street through towering walls of commercial buildings, old and new.

Colin Semple was happily in his office—a congeries of small, huddled rooms, dry and dirty with age, which had a doorway of its own in a corner of the court—and Thorpe pushed on to his room at the end like one who is assured of both his way and his welcome.

The broker was standing beside a desk, dictating a letter to a clerk who sat at it, and with only a nod to Thorpe he proceeded to finish this task. He looked more than once at his visitor as he did so, in a preoccupied, impersonal way. To the other\'s notion, he seemed the personification of business—without an ounce of distracting superfluous flesh upon his wiry, tough little frame, without a trace of unnecessary politeness, or humour, or sensibility of any sort. He was the machine perfected and fined down to absolute essentials. He could understand a joke if it was useful to him to do so. He could drink, and even smoke cigarettes, with a natural air, if these exercises seemed properly to belong to the task he had in hand. Thorpe did not conceive him doing anything for the mere human reason that he liked to do it. There was more than a touch of what the rustic calls “ginger” in his hair and closely-cropped, pointed beard, and he had the complementary florid skin. His eyes—notably direct, confident eyes—were of a grey which had in it more brown than blue. He wore a black frock-coat, buttoned close, and his linen produced the effect of a conspicuous whiteness.

He turned as the clerk left the room, and let his serious, thin lips relax for an instant as a deferred greeting. “Well?” he asked, impassively.

“Have you got a quarter-of-an-hour?” asked Thorpe in turn. “I want a talk with you.”

For answer, Semple left the room. Returning after a minute or two, he remarked, “Go ahead till we\'re stopped,” and seated himself on the corner of the desk with the light inconsequence of a bird on a twig. Thorpe unbuttoned his overcoat, laid aside his hat, and seated himself.

“I\'ve worked out the whole scheme,” he began, as if introducing the product of many sleepless nights\' cogitations. “I\'m going to leave England almost immediately—go on the Continent and loaf about—I\'ve never seen the Continent.”

Semple regarded him in silence. “Well?” he observed at last.

“You see the idea, don\'t you?” Thorpe demanded.

The broker twitched his shoulders slightly. “Go on,” he said.

“But the idea is everything,” protested the other. “We\'ve been thinking of beginning the campaign straight away—but the true game now is to lie low—silent as the grave. I go away now, d\'ye see? Nothing particular is said about it, of course, but in a month or two somebody notices that I\'m not about, and he happens to mention it to somebody else—and so there gets to be the impression that things haven\'t gone well with me, d\'ye see? On the same plan, I let all the clerks at my office go. The Secretary\'ll come round every once in a while to get letters, of course, and perhaps he\'ll keep a boy in the front office for show, but practically the place\'ll be shut up. That\'ll help out the general impression that I\'ve gone to pieces. Now d\'ye see?”

“It\'s the Special Settlement you\'re thinking of,” commented Semple.

“Of course. The fellows that we\'re going to squeeze would move heaven and hell to prevent our getting that Settlement, if they got wind of what was going on. The only weak point in our game is just there. Absolutely everything hangs on the Settlement being granted. Naturally, then, our play is to concentrate everything on getting it granted. We don\'t want to raise the remotest shadow of a suspicion of what we\'re up to, till after we\'re safe past that rock. So we go on in the way to attract the least possible attention. You or your jobber makes the ordinary application for a Special Settlement, with your six signatures and so on; and I go abroad quietly, and the office is as good as shut up, and nobody makes a peep about Rubber Consols—and the thing works itself. You do see it, don\'t you?”

“I see well enough the things that are to be seen,” replied Semple, with a certain brevity of manner. “There was a sermon of my father\'s that I remember, and it had for its text, \'We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen.\'”

Thorpe, pondering this for a moment, nodded his head. “Semple,” he said, bringing his chair forward to the desk, “that\'s what I\'ve come for. I want to spread my cards on the table for you. I know the sum you\'ve laid out already, in working this thing. We\'ll say that that is to be paid back to you, as a separate transaction, and we\'ll put that to one side. Now then, leaving that out of consideration, what do you think you ought to have out of the winnings, when we pull the thing off? Mind, I\'m not thinking of your 2,000 vendor\'s shares——”

“No—I\'m not thinking much of them, either,” interposed Semple, with a kind of dry significance.

“Oh, they\'ll be all right,” Thorpe affirmed. He laughed unconsciously as he did so. “No, what I want to get at is your idea of what should come to you, as a bonus, when I scoop the board.”

“Twenty thousand pounds,” said Semple, readily.

Thorpe\'s slow glance brightened a trifle. “I had thought thirty would be a fairer figure,” he remarked, with an effort at simplicity.

The broker put out his under-lip. “You will find people rather disposed to distrust a man who promises more than he\'s asked,” he remarked coldly.

“Yes—I know what you mean,” Thorpe hurried to say, flushing awkwardly, even though the remark was so undeserved; “but it\'s in my nature. I\'m full of the notion of doing things for people that have done things for me. That\'s the way I\'m built. Why”—he halted to consider the advisability of disclosing what he had promised to do for Lord Plowden, and decided against it—“why, without you, what would the whole thing have been worth to me? Take one thing alone—the money for the applications—I could have no more got at it than I could at the Crown Jewels in the Tower. I\'ve wondered since, more than once—if you don\'t mind the question—how did you happen to have so much ready money lying about.”

“There are some Glasgow and Aberdeen folk who trust me to invest for them,” the broker explained. “If they get five per cent. for the four months, they\'ll be very pleased. And so I shall be very pleased to take thirty thousand instead of twenty—if it presents itself to your mind in that way. You will give me a letter to that effect, of course.”

“Of course,” assented Thorpe. “Write it now, if you like.” He pushed his chair forward, closer to the desk, and dipped a pen in the ink. “What I want to do is this,” he said, looking up. “I\'ll make the promise for thirty-two thousand, and I\'ll get you to let me have two thousand in cash now—a personal advance. I shall need it, if I\'m to hang about on the Continent for four months. I judge you think it\'ll be four months before things materialize, eh?”

“The Special Settlement, in the natural order of events, would come shortly after the Christmas holidays. That is nearly three months. Then the work of taking fort-nightly profits will begin—and it is for you to say how long you allow that to go on.”

“But about the two thousand pounds now,” Thorpe reminded him.

“I think I will do that in this way,” said Semple, kicking his small legs nonchalantly. “I will buy two thousand fully-paid shares of you, for cash down, NOT vendor\'s shares, you observe—and then I will take your acknowledgment that you hold them for me in trust up to a given date. In that way, I would not at all weaken your market, and I would have a stake in the game.” “Your stake\'s pretty big, already,” commented Thorpe, tentatively.

“It\'s just a fancy of mine,” said the other, with his first smile. “I like to hold shares that are making sensational advances. It is very exciting.”

“All right,” said Thorpe, in accents of resignation. He wrote out two letters, accepting the wording which Semple suggested from his perch on the desk, and then the latter, hopping down, took the chair in turn and wrote a cheque.

“Do you want it open?” he asked over his shoulder. “Are you going to get it cashed at once?”

“No—cross it,” said the other. “I want it to go through my bankers. It\'ll warm their hearts toward me. I shan\'t be going till the end of the week, in any event. I suppose you know the Continent by heart.”

“On the contrary, very little indeed. I\'ve had business in Frankfort once, and in Rotterdam once, and in Paris twice. That is all.”

“But don\'t you ever do anything for pleasure?” Thorpe asked him, as he folded the cheque in his pocket-book.

“Oh yes—many things,” responded the broker, lightly. “It\'s a pleasure, for example, to buy Rubber Consols at par.”

“Oh, if you call it buying,” said Thorpe, and then softened his words with an apologetic laugh. “I didn\'t tell you, did I? I\'ve been spending Saturday and Sunday with Plowden—you know, the Lord Plowden on my Board.”

“I know of him very well,” observed the Scotchman.

“Has he a place that he asks people down to, then? That isn\'t the usual form with guinea-pigs.”

“Ah, but, he isn\'t the guinea-pig variety at all,” Thorpe asserted, warmly. “He\'s really a splendid fellow—with his little oddities, like the rest of us, of course, but a decent chap all through. Place? I should think he HAD got a place! It\'s one of the swellest old country-houses you ever saw—older than hell, you know—and it\'s kept up as if they had fifty thousand a year. Do you happen to know what his real income is supposed to be?”

Semple shook his head. He had taken his hat, and was smoothing it deftly with the palm of his hand.

“I asked,” Thorpe went on, “because he had so much to say about his poverty. To hear him talk, you\'d think the bailiffs were sitting on his doorstep. That doesn\'t prevent his having fast horses, and servants all over the place, and about the best shooting I\'ve seen in the South of England. As luck would have it, I was in wonderful form. God! how I knocked the pheasants!” A clerk showed his head at the door, with a meaning gesture. “I must go now,” said Semple, briskly, and led the way out to another room. He halted here, and dismissed his caller with the brief injunction, “Don\'t go away without seeing me.”

It was the noon-hour, and the least-considered grades of the City\'s slaves were in th............