“Well, perhaps you know best about that place. Monte Carlo is risky at the best of times for some folks, because you’re bound to meet crowds of people you know; and if they aren’t on the razzle-dazzle too, and pinned to decent silence through their own iniquities, some of them are apt to split when they get home again. But I don’t know why you should be horrified, seeing that we are _entre quatre yeux_ here, and not on one of your pious example platforms. You know you’ve been in a far hotter shop than Monte Carlo.—See me pot that red? Ah, _rouge perd_—Barcelona, to wit. If you remember, you were staying at the Cuatro Naciones, and at nights you used to cross the Rhambla, and——” “Mr. Onslow, how did you know all this?” “Do you remember objecting to take a sheaf of obvious spurious notes, and there was a row, and somebody whipped out a knife, and somebody else floored the knife-man with a chair?” “Yes—no.” “After which you very sensibly bolted. Well, I had only just that moment come in, but I saw you were a fellow-islander, and that’s why I handled the chair. You don’t remember me, and I didn’t know your name, but I recognized you the moment your wife introduced us, because I never forget a face.” “You’re mistaken. I never was in such a place in my life, sir. Think of the position I occupy. Why, the thing’s absurd!” “Now, my good sir, why waste lies? I’m not going to show you up. No fear. Why should I? It would probably ruin you, and I should stand self-convicted of being in the lowest and most desperate gambling hell in Europe, without being made a sixpence richer by the transaction. Only you didn’t know me, and you thought I didn’t know you; and I thought it would be handier if we were open about one another’s little ways at once before we went any further. Who knows but what we might be partners in some profitable business together?” Onslow put his cue down and faced his host, with hands deep in his trousers pockets. “It’s worth thinking about,” he observed. Mr. Theodore Shelf stood before the fireplace and drew a handkerchief across his forehead with trembling fingers. “What business do you refer to?” he asked at length. “None whatever. I’m not a business man. I make discoveries and don’t know how to use them. You are a business man and may be able to see where the money profit comes in. If you can, why then we’ll share the plunder. If you can’t, we’re neither of us worse off than before.” “But this is vague. What sort of discoveries? Have you found a mine?” “No, sir; in the present instance a channel!” “A channel?—I don’t understand you.”