And, alas for Sir Nigel and his lightly held treasures of art! his pictures and the vases ranged in great glass cases in the hall were heirlooms, and Toffy in his most impecunious days would often look at them sadly and shake his head, murmuring to himself, 'I 'd take five hundred pounds for the lot, and be glad to get rid of them.' There were days when in a gentle, philosophical way he felt a positive sense of injury in thinking of the vases behind the big glass doors, and he would then go into intricate and complicated sums in arithmetic whereby he could tell what it cost him per annum to look at the contents of the cases and the old portraits in their dim frames. This afternoon he was lying on a florid and uncomfortable-looking sofa in a very large drawing-room, in front of a fireplace of white marble in scroll patterns and with a fender of polished steel. It was probably the ugliest as well as the least comfortable room in the house, but it happened to be the only one in which there was a good fire that afternoon; and Toffy, descending from his bedroom, weak and ill with influenza, had come in there at two o'clock, and was now lying down with a railway-rug placed across his feet, and his head uncomfortably supported by a hard roller-cushion and an ornamentation in mahogany which gracefully finished off the pattern of the sofa-frame. Many men when they are ill take the precaution of making their wills; Sir Nigel's preparation for a possible early demise always took the form of elaborately and sadly adding up his accounts. He had a large ledger beside him on the sofa, and slips of paper covered with intricate figures which neither he nor any one else could decipher. His faithful valet Hopwood had been dispatched to London in order to learn chauffeur's work; for Toffy had decided, after working the matter out to a fraction, that a considerable saving could be effected in this way. His debts to the garage were being duly entered amongst Toffy's liabilities at this moment as he lay on the sofa in the vast cold drawing-room.