But on reaching the Captain’s rooms a very disagreeable surprise awaited them. Mr. Henriques was dead, and the executors on whom devolved the winding up of his affairs wrote, not merely to acquaint Captain Verinder with that melancholy fact, but also to give him notice that the bill at thirty days (the late Mr. H. had declined to have it drawn for a longer period, but had hinted that a renewal might perhaps be arranged) for one hundred and twenty pounds, principal and interest, bearing the joint signatures of himself and Mr. Lewis Clare, would have to be met in due course, and that, under the circumstances, any renewal of it was out of the question. Never were two men more dumfoundered. They had eaten their cake and enjoyed it, and now the reckoning must be paid. They were no better off than they had been at Brussels; indeed, they were worse off to the extent of twenty pounds, and, now as then, their predicament was such that, of all people in the world, Sir Gilbert was the last whose ears it must be allowed to reach. It was indeed a sorry home-coming. In the course of the following day Captain Verinder waited upon the executors, but the only concession he could obtain from them was a week’s grace beyond the date when the note would fall due. “London swarms with money-lenders,” said Luigi; “surely, one or other of them would do as Henriques did, and advance us enough money on our joint signatures to pay off this confounded bill.” “Very possibly that might be managed; but what then? We should merely be putting off the evil day for a little while, and the worst of it would be that the longer we succeeded in staving it off, the bigger would be the reckoning when it did come. At present all we have to find is a hundred and twenty pounds, but if we should succeed in negotiating another bill, at the end of two or three months we should have a hundred and fifty to meet, and supposing we were compelled to go on renewing, a little later we should have to face a liability of a couple of hundred pounds; and so it would go up by leaps and bounds in the way of compound interest till some day our good friends the usurers would put the screw on, and the inevitable crash would come. No; we must, if possible, find some better way out of our difficulty than that. I’ll sleep on it; perhaps an idea may come to me in the course of the night.” Next morning the Captain seemed in a thoughtful mood, and as Luigi was in no humour for talking, breakfast passed almost in silence. When it had come to an end, and the equipage had been removed, the elder man said: “Draw up that easy chair to the window, and light a weed. I have something to say to you.” As soon as his own meerschaum and Luigi’s cigar were well under way, he resumed: “You remember that day about which you spoke to me while we were abroad, when, Mr. Everard Lisle being away on business for your grandfather, the old gentleman called you into his study and got you to write one or two letters for him?”