Then he ingratiated himself with an employer so that he was entrusted with the sole management of the branch business at C----. Here, he "splurged"; spent money freely, and--when he heard that the pretty schoolgirl he had succeeded in establishing a flirtation with was the only surviving member of the weakly family represented by the wealthy Sir Thomas Thorne--he grew more and more reckless in the expenditure of his master’s money and in his falsifying of the accounts. Like many others of his kind, he overreached his mark. When he paid a flying visit to London to marry Joan before she was adopted by her uncle--her mother had just died--it occurred to the head of his firm to "run over" to C---- and audit the books. The day of Mercier’s secret marriage he heard that "the game was up," and his only means of escape, instant flight and lasting absence. It was quite true that his firm failed a couple of years later. But he had then just established himself as partner in a drinking-bar in the unsavoury neighbourhood of a gold mine in South Africa. The lady of the establishment had fallen in love with him, and there was, in fact, money to be made all round about by one who was not too particular in his morals and opinions. Suddenly, the neighbourhood grew too hot for him, and he found it convenient to remember that the rich Miss Joan Thorne must now be twenty-one and ready to be claimed as his wife. So he returned with money enough to make a show, later on, of being rich, at least for a month or two. The first thing was to find Joan: the next to meet her. An acquaintance made in his comparatively innocent boyhood happened to be now confidential valet to the Duke of Arran. He sought him out, flattered, and--without confiding his real story to him--made him his creature by using a certain power of fascination which had helped on his unworthy career from its beginning. Paul Naz got him engagements as "extra hand" on state occasions in noblemen’s houses; he had fulfilled three of these before he attained his end and encountered Joan at the Duke’s--Paul consented to pay court to Julie le Roux, Miss Thorne’s maid, so as to keep his old playfellow informed as to the doings of the family, who, he told him, owed his late father a considerable sum of money, which he wished to recover privately to save scandal. That very night Paul was taking Julie to see Mercier’s so-called half-sister act in a transpontine theatre. "Vera Anerley," as she had stage-named herself, had been on tour with a popular piece--was absent at the time of Victor’s return--and had appealed to his vanity by her wild emotion when they met. He was to see her on the stage, and to have a word with Naz, who had had to probe Julie in a certain direction, after he left his "wife" in the Regent’s Park.