It was strange to look back now to the time when he and George were both in the city, himself in dog-biscuits and George in wool, and to remember that except their father everybody in the family had foretold a prosperous commercial career for George. Beyond his skill at Solo Whist and a combination of luck with judgment in betting through July and August on weight for age selling-plates and avoiding the big autumn handicaps, John could not recall that George had ever shown a glimmer of financial intelligence. Once or twice when he had visited his brother in the wool-warehouse he had watched an interview between George and a bale of wool, and he had often chuckled at the reflection that the protagonists were well matched--there had always been something woolly about George in mind and body; and when one day he rolled stolidly forth from the warehouse for the last time in order to enter into partnership with a deluded friend to act as the British agents for a society of colonial housewives, John felt that the deluded friend would have been equally well served by a bale of wool. When George and his deluded friend had tried the patience of the colonial housewives for a year by never once succeeding in procuring for them what they required, the partnership was dissolved, and George processed from undertaking to undertaking till he became the business manager of a theatrical touring company. Although as a business manager he reached the nadir of his incompetence he emerged from the post with Eleanor for wife, which perhaps gave rise to a family legend that George had never been so successful as when he was a business manager. This legend he never dispelled by a second exhibition of himself in the part, although he often spoke regretfully of the long Sundays in the train, playing nap for penny points. After he married Eleanor he was commission-agent for a variety of gentlemanly commodities like whisky and cigars; but he drank and smoked much more than he sold, and when bridge was introduced and popularized, having decided that it was the best investment for his share of Eleanor's salary, he abandoned everything else. Moreover, John's increasing prosperity gave his play a fine stability and confidence; he used to feel that his wife's current account merely lapped the base of a solid cliff of capital. A bad week at Bridge came to be known as another financial disappointment; but he used to say cheerfully when he signed the I.O.U. that one must not expect everybody in the family to be always lucky, and that it was dear old John's turn this week. John himself sometimes became quite giddy in watching the swift revolutions of the wheel of fortune as spun by George. The effect of sitting up late at cards usually made George wake with a headache, which he called "feeling overworked"; he was at his best in the dusky hours before dinner, in fact just at the time when John was on his way to explode in his ear the news of the children's disappearance; it was