DEAR MR. MONKLEY,--Our young friend handed me a check for £200 the day before yesterday. As he seemed uncertain about the remainder of the sum promised, I took the liberty of drawing my share at once. My great work requires immediate assistance, and I am now busily occupied in Paris. My next address will be a castle in Spain, where perhaps we shall meet when you are looking for your next site. Most truly yours, JOSEPHE-ERNESTE, PRINCE DE CONDÉ. Jimmy and Henry stared at each other. "I knew it," said Henry. "I'm always wrong; but I knew it. Still, if I could catch him, it would take more than Condy's Fluid to disinfect that pea-green welsher after I'd done with him." Monkley sat biting his lips in silence; and Sylvia, recognizing the expression in his eyes that she dreaded formerly, notwithstanding that he was now her best friend, felt sharply her old repugnance for him. Henry was still abusing the defaulter when Monkley cut him short. "Shut up. I rather admire him." "Admire him?" Henry gasped. "I suppose you'd admire the hangman and shake hands with him on the scaffold. It's all very fine for you. You didn't have to learn how Ferdinand the Fifty-eighth married Isabella the Innocent, daughter of Alphonso the Eighth, commonly called Alphonso the Anxious. Condy's Fluid! I swallowed enough of it, I can tell you." Monkley told him gruffly to keep quiet; then he sat down and began to write, still with that expression in his eyes. Presently he tore up the letter and paced the room. "Damn that swine," he suddenly shouted, kicking the spindle-legged table into the fireplace. "We wanted the money, you know. We wanted the money badly." Shortly before dawn the three of them abandoned the new house in Streatham and occupied rooms in the Kennington Park Road. Monkley and Sylvia's father resumed the racing that had temporarily been interrupted by ambition. Sylvia wandered about the streets in a suit of Etons that was rapidly showing signs of wear. One day early in the new year Sylvia was leaning over the parapet of Waterloo Bridge and munching hot chestnuts. The warmth of them in her pockets was grateful. Her pastime of dropping the shells into the river did not lack interest; she was vaguely conscious in the frosty sunshine of life's bounty, and she offered to the future a welcome from the depths of her being; meanwhile there still remained forty chestnuts to be eaten. Her meditation was interrupted by a voice from a passerby who had detached himself from the stream of traffic that she had been disregarding in her pensive greed; she looked up and met the glance of a pleasant middle-aged gentleman in a dark-gray coat with collar and cuffs of chinchilla, who was evidently anxious to begin a conversation. "You're out of school early," he observed. Sylvia replied that she did not go to school.