"I trust, sir, that I may have something to say to you that will be pleasant to us both." CHAPTER XIII. AN AFTERNOON CALL. "You're sleeping it out. Are you going to lie in bed all day?" I opened my eyes. I looked up. Somebody was shaking me--Archie Beaupré. "You don't mean to say that you're awake? I admire your hours." "Is it late?" "I don't know what you call late. It's nearly one. Do you generally sleep to this time?" "Made rather a night of it, my boy. It was five when I left the Climax." "Oh, you went to the Climax, did you, after you left Jardine's? Win?" "A trifle. What brings you here--starting in the early-calling line?" Archie seated himself on the bed, murmuring-- "He calls this early." Beaupré is the third son of the Duke of Glenlivet--one of the duke's famed thirteen. Not a bad sort--stone broke, like all the rest of us. Archie was born in two different sections--one-half of him makes all for wickedness, and the other half makes all the other way--and, whichever half of him is to the fore, he's thorough. Jardine and I had found him in the drawing-room with Dora when we had finished our hobnobbing--at which I was not sorry. When a man has had the sort of talk with the father which I had had, he is not, on the instant, all agog for a _tête-à-tête_ with the child. He wants to straighten things out inside his head a bit. We had left the Jardines together, Beaupré and I. He had gone to some twenty-third cousin of his great grandmother--the man's relations are as the sands of the sea for multitude, and he keeps in with every one of them--and I had gone on to the Climax Club. Now, I wondered what he wanted on my bed. When Burton had brought me my coffee, and Archie had put himself outside a soda, tempered, he began. "Don't laugh at me, old chap." Of course, when he told me not to laugh, I was at once upon the grin--it's human nature. But he went on, "I am a miserable wretch, I swear I am." "Who says you aren't?" "What a muck I've made of things!" "Who denies it? Give me the rascal's name?" "And I might have been a respectable chap once, if I had liked." "My dear Archie! When?" He was too woebegone to heed my chaff. He went and leaned his elbow on my mantelshelf, and his head upon his hand. "Reggie, I've been thinking that you and I ought to cut the Jardines." "The deuce, you have!" "For their sake. It is not fair to them that we should let them run the risk of being contaminated by even a remote connection with the shadow which, I suppose sooner or later, is sure to fall on us. It will come specially hard on me--because I don't mind telling you, between ourselves, that Miss Jardine's society to me means much." I stared; things were coming out. "But the knowledge that this is so has come too late. Unless the whole business of the club--I won't give it a name, but you know the club which meets once a month in Horseferry Road--is a ghastly joke."