"What did you do with the rest?" "Paid my landlady for--good Lord! I see what you mean! He paid me with marked bills! The--the damned scoundrel!" "He not only did that, my boy, but he put a man on your trail to recover them as fast as you disposed of them," said M. Mirabeau calmly. CHAPTER VIII LADY JANE GOES ABOUT IT PROMPTLY A FEW minutes before six o'clock that same afternoon, Mr. James Cricklewick, senior member of the firm of Cricklewick, Stackable & Co., linen merchants, got up from his desk in the crowded little compartment labelled "Private," and peered out of the second-floor window into the busy street below. Thousands of people were scurrying along the pavements in the direction of the brilliantly lighted Fifth Avenue, a few rods away; vague, dusky, unrecognizable forms in the darkness that comes so early and so abruptly to the cross-town streets at the end of a young March day. The middle of the street presented a serried line of snow heaps, piled up by the shovellers the day before,--symmetrical little mountains that formed an impassable range over which no chauffeur had the temerity to bolt in his senseless ambition to pass the car ahead. Mr. James Cricklewick sighed. He knew from past experience that the Rock of Ages was but little more enduring than the snow-capped range in front of him. Time and a persistent sun inevitably would do the work of man, but in the meantime Mr. Cricklewick's wagons and trucks were a day and a half behind with deliveries, and that was worth sighing about. As he stood looking down the street, he sighed again. For more than forty years Mr. Cricklewick had made constant use of the phrase: "It's always something." If there was no one to say it to, he satisfied himself by condensing the lament into a strictly personal sigh. He first resorted to the remark far back in the days when he was in the service of the Marquis of Camelford. If it wasn't one thing that was going wrong it was another; in any event it was "always something." Prosperity and environment had not succeeded in bringing him to the point where he could snap his fingers and lightly say in the face of annoyances: "It's really nothing." The fact that he was, after twenty-five years of ceaseless climbing, at the head of the well-known and thoroughly responsible house of Cricklewick, Stackable & Co., Linen Merchants and Drapers,--(he insisted on attaching the London word, not through sentiment, but for the sake of isolation),--operated not at all in bringing about a becalmed state of mind. Habitually he was disturbed by little things, which should not be in the least surprising when one stops to think of the multitudinous annoyances he must have experienced while managing the staff of under-servants in the extensive establishment of the late Marquis of Camelford.