‘Yes, it lasted a long time—I knowing I was cheated, yet unable to prove it; he spending his days in sloth, his nights in dissipation, yet every now and then, by some brilliant stroke of business, compelling me to admire him. My customers liked him, the young men especially; for he had all those modern ideas which were as strange to me as a Cuneiform inscription. Somehow he brought grist to the mill. His University friends found him out, made my shop a lounge, borrowed my money, and paid me a protective rate of interest. We had our quarrels—not violent and noisy, like the quarrels in which women are concerned, but perhaps all the more lasting in their effect. Where he went at night I knew not, until going into his room very early one morning to wake him—there was to be a great picture-sale twenty miles from London that day, and I wanted him to attend it—I saw some gold and notes scattered on the table by his bedside. From that moment I knew the worst of his vices. He was a gambler. Where he played or with whom I never knew. I never played the spy upon him, or attempted to get at his secrets in any underhand manner. One day I taxed him with this vice. He shrugged his shoulders, and affected supreme candour. “I play a little sometimes,” he said—“games of skill, not chance. It is impossible to keep such company as I keep and not take an occasional hand at whist or écarté. And you ought not to forget that my friends have been profitable to you.” A year after this I had occasion to sell a portion of my stock at Christie’s, in order to obtain ready money to purchase the lease of premises adjoining my own—premises which would enable me to enlarge my art gallery. The things were sold, and, a few days afterwards, settled for. I brought home the money—between five and six hundred pounds—locked it in my safe, impregnable even to my junior partner, and sat down to dinner with the key in my pocket, and, as I believed, my money secure.’ Again there was a pause, painful recollections contracting the deeply-lined brow, gloomy thoughts clouding the eyes.