“Some of us are like the chap who said he’d take his dying oath the cat was grey. Then they asked him to bet a halfpenny that it was, and he wouldn’t. So bang goes another wind-bag!” He was marching out with all the honours when I lost my temper and took the brute at his word. “Done!” I said. Think of it! A man of five-and-fifty, with some reputation for general mental stability, and a member of the Committee of the Stock Exchange! “You’ll take me?” he asked, and there was an evil light in the man’s hard blue eyes, while his red whiskers actually bristled as he spoke. “You’ll back yourself to follow every scrap of advice given you throughout one whole day for a thousand pounds?” In my madness I answered, only intent upon arranging miseries for him: “Yes, if you’ll back yourself to act in an exactly contrary manner.” “Most certainly. It’s my ordinary rule of life,” he replied. “I never do take advice. I’m not a congenital idiot. Let us say to-morrow.” Now, upon the Stock Exchange we have a universal system by which honour stands for security. In our peculiar business relations this principle is absolutely necessary. And it seldom fails. There is a simple, pathetic trust amongst us unknown in other walks of life. It can only be compared to that universal spirit said to have existed in King Alfred’s days, when we are invited to believe that people left their jewellery about on the hedges with impunity, and crime practically ceased out of the land. One’s only assumption can be that the jewellery of those benighted days was not worth the risk--though, understand me, I am merely speaking of the times, not of King Alfred, who was, without question, the greatest Englishman of whom we have any record. So when Bellamy and I made this fatuous bet, we trusted each the other. I knew that, with all his faults, the man was absolutely straight-forward and honest; and I felt that, having once taken his wager, I should either win it--at personal inconvenience impossible to estimate before the event--or lose and frankly pay. “To-morrow,” said Bellamy. “Let us say to-morrow. You don’t want a thing like this hanging over you. We’ll meet here and lunch and compare notes--if you’re free to do so, which is doubtful, for I see a holy chaos opening out before you.” “To-morrow!” I said. “And, be what it may, I would not change my position for yours.” I went home that night under a gathering weight of care. To my wife and daughters I said nothing, though they noticed and commented upon my unusual taciturnity. In truth, the more I thought of the programme in store for me, the less I liked it; while Bellamy, on the contrary, so far as I could see, despite my big words at parting from him, had only to be slightly more brutal and aggressive than usual to come well out of his ordeal. I slept ill and woke depressed. The weather was ominous in itself. I looked out of my dressing-room window and quoted from the classics: