‘Now,’ said Mr. Sivewright, with the old keen look and sharp tone, the natural energy in the man dominating even the prostration of sickness, ‘give me a straight answer to a straight question. You have had the run of this house for a long time; have seen everything, have had time to form your judgment: which do you think me now—a poor man or a miser?’ ‘You will not be offended by my candour?’ inquired Lucius. ‘Certainly not. Have I not enjoined you to be candid?’ ‘Then,’ replied the other, with a grave smile, ‘I admit that, in spite of your protestations of poverty, I have thought you rich. Until a short time ago, indeed, I was inclined to believe your statement; I really thought that you had sunk all your money in the purchase of these things,’ with that half-contemptuous glance at the art-treasures which Mr. Sivewright had before observed; ‘but when you spoke the other day of a possible intruder in this house with so much alarm, I told myself that if you had nothing to lose—or nothing more portable than yonder mummy or this desk—you could hardly cherish the suspicion of foul play.’ ‘Fairly reasoned. Then you thought, because I was alarmed by the idea of a secret visitant prowling about my house in the dead of the night, that I must needs have some secret hoard, some hidden treasure for whose safety I feared?’ ‘That was almost my thought.’ ‘There you were wrong; but only so far were you wrong,’ answered Mr. Sivewright, with unwonted energy. ‘I am not such a baby as to hoard my guineas in an old muniment chest, for the babyish pleasure of gloating over my treasure in the stillness of the night—letting the golden coins run like glittering yellow water through my fingers; counting and recounting; stacking the gold into little piles, twenties, fifties, hundreds. No. I am a miser—granted; but I am not a fool. There is nothing in this house but the objects which you have seen; but those are worth a fortune. This very table at which I am now sitting, and which to your uneducated eye doubtless seems a trumpery gimcrack thing, was sold at Christie’s three years ago for a hundred and twenty pounds, and will sell a year hence for half as much again. The value of money is diminishing year by year; the number of wealthy buyers is increasing year by year; and these treasures and relics of the past—specimens of manufactures that have perished, of arts that are forgotten, the handiwork of genius which has left no inheritors—these cannot multiply. The capital these represent is large, and whenever they are put up to auction in Christie and Manson’s sale-rooms, that capital will be quadrupled. I do not speak at random, Davoren; I know my trade. After the apprenticeship of a lifetime I can venture to speak boldly. I have spent something like ten thousand pounds upon the treasures of this house, and I consider that ten thousand of sunk capital to represent between forty and fifty thousand in the future.’