“I--I don’t believe you were right--about what you thought.” The sharp-featured face was changing from pale to red. “You’d have to be able to swear to it, anyhow, and I don’t believe you can.” He looked at Palliser in eager and anxious uncertainty. “If you could,” he dragged out, “I shouldn’t have a check-book. Where would you be then?” “I should be in comfortable circumstances, dear chap, and so would you if you gave me the money to-night, while you possess a check-book. It would be only a sort of temporary loan in any case, whatever turned up. The investment would quadruple itself. But there is no time to be lost. Understand that.” T. Tembarom broke out into a sort of boyish resentment. “I don’t believe he did look like him, anyhow,” he cried. “I believe it’s all a bluff.” His crude-sounding young swagger had a touch of final desperation in it as he turned on Palliser. “I’m dead sure it’s a bluff. What a fool I was not to think of that! You want to bluff me into going into this Cedric thing. You could no more swear he was like him than--than I could.” The outright, presumptuous, bold stripping bare of his phrases infuriated Palliser too suddenly and too much. He stepped up to him and looked into his eyes. “Bluff you, you young bounder!” he flung out at him. “You’re losing your head. You’re not in New York streets here. You are talking to a gentleman. No,” he said furiously, “I couldn’t swear that he was like him, but what I _can_ swear in any court of justice is that the man I saw at the window _was_ Jem Temple Barholm, and no other man on earth.” [Illustration] When he had said it, he saw the astonishing dolt change his expression utterly again, as if in a flash. He stood up, putting his hands in his pockets. His face changed, his voice changed. “Fine!” he said. “First-rate! That’s what I wanted to get on to.” CHAPTER XXXV