"I couldn't very well say anything to him, because I was getting into hot water myself for spending money. And when he wrote in mid-term for an extra sovereign, my mother blamed me for setting him a bad example. Lord! I didn't have a sovereign a year when I was thirteen. Times had changed. "I had been drifting along for some time, expecting when my time was up to be put on the staff, as was usual with pupils. They usually gave us a job until we could use our influence to get an appointment somewhere. But in my case it didn't happen so. The day my three years' term was up, a beautiful spring day, the junior partner informed me that I could consider myself finished, and handed me a reference that, for all the use it was, might have gone into the waste-paper basket then and there. "I was staggered. I had no idea of how to get a job. Why had I been pushed out? Simply because the firm had found out I had no influence with Sir Gregory Gotch, no standing socially at all. I was an alien in their ranks. I went out of that office with all the externals of a gentleman and a public-school boy, but inwardly an outsider as you may say. One thing I had though, and that was the firm conviction that 'pull' and not merit counted. I had to get some one to 'influence' a job in my favour. It would not have been gentlemanly to answer an advertisement! "My mother thought at once of one of my uncles, who had retired from the sea and was now a marine superintendent in Fenchurch Street. I called to see him; but he was abroad attending to a damaged ship. I think it was a month before I happened to meet the Winchester boy who had been in the works with me. Quite by accident it was. Let me see now----" Mr. Carville paused again, and leaning over to one of the geranium tubs knocked his pipe out. Suddenly he laughed. "Why," he said, "I'm telling you the whole story." "That's what we want you to do," I said, and the others nodded.