“Oh health’s money!” I said. “Get well, and the rest will take care of itself. I’m interested in your questionable claim--it’s the question that’s the charm; and pretenders, to anything big enough, have always been, for me, an attractive class. Only their first duty’s to be gallant.” “Their first duty’s to understand their own points and to know their own mind,” he returned with hopeless lucidity. “Don’t ask me to climb our family tree now,” he added; “I fear I haven’t the head for it. I’ll try some day--if it will bear my weight; or yours added to mine. There’s no doubt, however, that we, as they say, go back. But I know nothing of business. If I were to take the matter in hand I should break in two the poor little silken thread from which everything hangs. In a better world than this I think I should be listened to. But the wind doesn’t set to ideal justice. There’s no doubt that a hundred years ago we suffered a palpable wrong. Yet we made no appeal at the time, and the dust of a century now lies heaped upon our silence. Let it rest!” “What then,” I asked, “is the estimated value of your interest?” “We were instructed from the first to accept a compromise. Compared with the whole property our ideas have been small. We were once advised in the sense of a hundred and thirty thousand dollars. Why a hundred and thirty I’m sure I don’t know. Don’t beguile me into figures.” “Allow me one more question,” I said. “Who’s actually in possession?” “A certain Mr. Richard Searle. I know nothing about him.” “He’s in some way related to you?” “Our great-grandfathers were half-brothers. What does that make us?” “Twentieth cousins, say. And where does your twentieth cousin live?” “At a place called Lackley--in Middleshire.” I thought it over. “Well, suppose we look up Lackley in Middleshire!” He got straight up. “Go and see it?” “Go and see it.” “Well,” he said, “with you I’ll go anywhere.” On our return to town we determined to spend three days there together and then proceed to our errand. We were as conscious one as the other of that deeper mystic appeal made by London to those superstitious pilgrims who feel it the mother-city of their race, the distributing heart of their traditional life. Certain characteristics of the dusky Babylon, certain aspects, phases, features, “say” more to the American spiritual ear than anything else in Europe. The influence of these things on Searle it charmed me to note. His observation I soon saw to be, as I pronounced it to him, searching and caressing. His almost morbid appetite for any over-scoring of time, well-nigh extinct from long inanition, threw the flush of its revival into his face and his talk. II