Mr Davison drove a very peculiar trade. In society he figured as a man of culture, and of large independent means. He lived in one of the most costly of the many palatial flats in which opulent London loves to disport itself, and dispensed his hospitality on a very lavish and comprehensive scale. Assisted by his wife, a woman who was very beautiful, and as clever as himself, he gave receptions to which the titled and untitled flower of English aristocracy thought itself fortunate to be invited, and spent vast sums in apparently ostentatious extravagance. But this extravagance was really the medium by which he found opportunities of gauging, and of trading upon, the social and financial position of his hosts of acquaintances, who never dreamed that the wherewithal of the splendid hospitality at which they wondered was derived from their own needs. Mr Davison was really a money-lender on a huge scale, and had at least half-a-dozen flourishing West-End establishments. At one of them he traded, under a fictitious name, as a dealer in gold and silver plate, and at another, under another alias, he made costly jewellery his principal line. From still another establishment he drew plethoric profits by lending large sums of money on valuables, at another he advanced money on real estate at huge interest, and at one or two others he drove an equally lucrative trade on somewhat different lines. But at none of his shops did he ever put in a personal appearance, though he was actually the guiding spirit of them all. He had one little room in his flat to which no one was ever allowed to penetrate except himself and his wife. Connecting this room with his various establishments was an elaborate system of telephoning, and from this so-called “study” he was able to direct the multifarious threads of his vast business. Add to his acquisitive capacity the fact that he had the power of winning the confidence of others to an extraordinary degree, and it will be seen how much more easy it was for him to manage so complicated a business than for a man with less tact and polish, or for a man whose wife was inferior to Mrs Davison, who was her husband’s very double in cunning and suavity. And then they both had such a clever way of advising their friends out of their difficulties, that success was a foregone conclusion with them. “Do you know, Lady C.,” would be Mrs Davison’s advice to a bosom friend whose present condition was that of chronic impecuniosity, but whose future was assured wealth. “If I were you, I would do just what dear Gerald and I had to do a year or two ago, when we were at our wit’s end for money, owing to a temporary depreciation of land values. We knew that all would come right in time, and we bought a couple of thousand pounds’ worth of jewellery from Edison & Co. and a thousand pounds worth of gold and silver plate from Meeson’s.”