At five minutes past nine there was a careful tap at the door. The messenger had returned from Adelphi Terrace. Mr. Redgrave was not at his rooms. He had gone out on the previous evening, and had not come in again. The landlady knew not where he was. ‘Send again at noon, Oakley,’ said the Napoleon. In another minute there was another tap at the door. ‘Come in!’--angrily. The footman announced that Sir Arthur Custer had called. ‘D----n Sir Arthur Custer!’ said the master of the house. ‘Here, Oakley, get out of this! I must see him.’ Oakley got out, and Sir Arthur was ushered in. Sir Arthur looked at his host queerly, and then with much care shut the door. ‘I say, Lock,’ he said, putting his silk hat on the table, ‘it seems to me we’re in a devil of a hole.’ ‘Indeed!’ said Simon Lock cautiously. ‘Yes,’ Sir Arthur insisted. ‘Of course I’m sure that when you asked me to join you in this Princesse affair----’ ‘You will pardon me, Sir Arthur,’ said Lock, stopping him very politely and formally, ‘I did not ask you to join me. It was yourself who suggested that.’ ‘Ah, well!’ said Sir Arthur, with a little less assurance, ‘we won’t quarrel about that. At any rate, I understood from you that we were in for a deuced good thing.’ ‘That is so,’ Lock returned. ‘By the way, sit down, Sir Arthur, and remain calm.’ ‘Am I not calm?’ asked the member of Parliament, whose pomposity was unaccustomed to be trifled with. ‘Certainly you are calm. I merely ask you to remain so. Now to come to the business in hand. I said, you remind me, that we were in for a good thing. So we were. But some secret force has been working against us. If I could unmask that secret force all would be well, for I could then bring pressure to bear that would effectually---- You understand?’ ‘No matter from what direction the force came?’ ‘No matter from what direction. And, Sir Arthur,’ said Simon Lock impressively, ‘I shall find it out.’ He repeated the phrase still more impressively, ‘I shall find it out. Simon Lock has never yet been defeated, and he will not be defeated now. I began life, Sir Arthur, on half-a-crown a week. There were conspiracies against me then, but I upset them. At the age of fifty-five, on a slightly larger scale ‘--he smiled--‘I shall repeat the operations of my early youth.’ Simon Lock, like many self-made men, was extremely fond of referring to his early youth and the humbleness of his beginnings. He thought that it proved an absence of snobbery in his individuality. ‘And in the meantime?’ ‘In the meantime, I frankly confess, Sir Arthur, we have sold more La Princesse shares than we can deliver. Nay, further, we have sold, I fear, more La Princesse shares than actually exist. We sold freely for the fall. I knew that the shares would fall soon after the flotation, and they did. But they have mysteriously risen again.’ ‘And are still rising,’ Sir Arthur put in, nervously stroking his long thin beard.