"Good day, madame," added Kleinwort, dropping a little behind. "Your dear husband must make health, and, you madame, I shall trust ere long time, to see red and not white. You must not mind Forde," he said, almost in a whisper. "He is rough, he is, that is why I comed; but good--so good when you get under his crust." Mrs. Mortomley put her cold hand in Kleinwort's as she had put it into that of Forde, and said good-bye to the one man as she had said it to the other, with a wintry smile. So they parted. Never--for ever did she see either of the two again. Meantime, they drove back to London together in silence--silence broken only once. "What are you doing, Kleinwort; why don't you speak?" asked Mr. Forde. "I am thinking--thinking, my friend," was the reply. "Then I wish to Heaven you would not think," said the unfortunate manager. "It is deucedly unpleasant, you know." "You are so what you call droll," observed Mr. Kleinwort with cheerful calmness. An Englishman must be artificially iced before he can ever hope to attain to a foreigner's degree of coolness. CHAPTER II. KLEINWORT AND CO. IN CONSULTATION. Drowning men catch at straws. It is not the fault of the straws that they fail to save, and assuredly it is not the fault of the drowning men that they carry the straws to destruction with them. The General Chemical Company on that Friday evening when Mr. Kleinwort was asked to bring his persuasive powers to bear on the recusant family at Homewood, chanced to be in precisely the state of a drowning man making frantic clutches at safety, and Mr. Forde's worst enemy might have pitied him had he understood all Mr. Mortomley's "going" meant to the manager of St. Vedast Wharf. He had driven out to Homewood vowing that Mortomley, willing or unwilling, should not stop, and it was only when he found affairs had passed beyond his control, that he began to think whether there was no way out of the difficulty. Like an inspiration the idea of keeping the whole thing quiet, of hoodwinking his directors, and of holding the ball still at his feet, occurred to him. He had to do with fools, and he humoured them according to their folly, and indeed the notion of suggesting the substitution of the Company's solicitor for the solicitor of Mr. Mortomley amounted almost to a stroke of genius. To Kleinwort there was a certain humour in the idea of first gibbeting a man as a rogue, and then treating him as a simpleton. It was a feat the German performed mentally every day, but then he kept the affair secret between himself and his brains. He did not possess the frankness of that "so droll Forde," and the tactics of his friend tickled him extremely. And yet, truth to say, Mrs. Mortomley was not so supreme an idiot as the autocrat of St. Vedast's Wharf imagined.