"I owe you thanks, Ralph, for your suggestions. So far they have been most valuable. I shall not soon forget how wisely you encouraged me to hold on. I only wish I could reciprocate your favours; but that is not to be hoped. You know all the ropes so much better than I do. Take the will for the deed, old man! and if--by good fortune--if ever----" "But you can, my dear Jordan, you really can--and I am glad to know that your goodwill is equal to the test; though indeed it is nothing I am asking after all--nothing to cost you anything." "Name it," mumbled Jordan with a good deal less effusion than he had been indulging in the minute before, though still as cordially as the staccato shock to his nerves would allow. To say truth, he felt not unlike the sportive mouse, which, in pure lightness of heart, has nibbled through the thread whose yielding liberates the spring which catches and holds as in a vice. What wonder that instinctively he should wriggle to withdraw, the moment he felt himself being held, even to a position of his own choosing? Bitten by his own teeth, he would have felt less foolish--less like the stag entangled by his own antlers in a thicket, to wait the coming of the hunter and his hounds. Ralph noted the change in manner and tone; and the humour of it, causing inward laughter, made the smoke he was inhaling lose its way, and brought on a fit of coughing. "I want you to pay up Gerald's fortune at once," he said at length. "It wants not much more than a year, you know, to the time fixed. He is of age, and he is my partner, so we shall both be responsible. I am Gerald's next heir, too, so it can have no bad consequences for you, besides being a great convenience to us." The tumult in Jordan's circulation had had time to subside, and his voice had grown even again. It was more mellifluously soothing now than even its professional wont. "How I wish it had been something else," he said; "something within the bounds of possibility. It distresses me to--but----" "Quite so, my friend. The usual way of the world. Anything that is not wanted you would have felt it a privilege to do. Is it not so?--even to pulling out your eyes, only you know I am not a cannibal and prefer oysters; so they would be of no use." "Really, my dear Ralph, you must not put it in that way, you know. Indeed, you have no right to say so. Just think----" "Oh, I know--quite so--by all means, if you wish it. I know better than chop arguments with a lawyer. That would be worse than an altercation with a woman. He is not satisfied, like her, with the _last_ word, he must have the best of it as well. But the facts remain." "Is that not an admission, my friend, that you know your position will not bear examination?" "Look out for your own position, friend Jordan! I have a presentiment it would not be impossible to knock that over like a house of cards on the Stock Exchange to-morrow morning, however easily you might overthrow me in argument to-night."