"I shall, therefore, address a letter to my friend, acquainting him with the mishap to his coat. I shall inform him that the insects have destroyed the fur in the shoulders, laying bare the padding, and that while I have been negligent in my care of his property up to this time, I shall not be so in the future. Without betraying the secret, I shall in some way let him know that the money is safe and that he may expect to regain all of it when he--when he comes out." "Good!" exclaimed Mr. Bramble warmly. M. Mirabeau suddenly broke into uproarious laughter. "Mon dieu!" he gasped, when he could catch his breath. The others were staring at him in alarm. "It is rare! It is exquisite! The refinement of justice! That _this_ should have happened to the blood-sucking Mrs. Jacobs! Oho--ho--ho!" CHAPTER XIV DIPLOMACY MR. SMITH-PARVIS, Senior, entertained one old-fashioned, back-number idea,--relict of a throttled past; it was a pestiferous idea that always kept bobbing up in an insistent, aggravating way the instant he realized that he had a few minutes to himself. Psychologists might go so far as to claim that he had been born with it; that it was, after a fashion, hereditary. He had come of honest, hard-working Smiths; the men and women before him had cultivated the idea with such unwavering assiduity that, despite all that had conspired to stifle it, the thing still clung to him and would not be shaken off. In short, Mr. Smith-Parvis had an idea that a man should work. Especially a young man. In secret he squirmed over the fact that his son Stuyvesant had never been known to do a day's work in his life. Not that it was actually necessary for the young man to descend to anything so common and inelegant as earning his daily bread, or that there was even a remote prospect of the wolf sniffing around a future doorway. Not at all. He knew that Stuyvie didn't have to work. Still, it grieved him to see so much youthful energy going to waste. He had never quite gotten over the feeling that a man could make something besides a mere gentleman of himself, and do it without seriously impairing the family honour. He had once suggested to his wife that Stuyvesant ought to go to work. He didn't care what he took up, just so he took up something. Mrs. Smith-Parvis was horrified. She would not listen to his reiterations that he didn't mean clerking in a drygoods shop, or collecting fares on a street car, or repairing electric doorbells, or anything of the kind, and she wouldn't allow him to say just what sort of work he did mean. The subject was not mentioned again for years. Stuyvesant was allowed to go on being a gentleman in his own sweet way.