Boyd laughed. “My confession—to accept your own term—will be of the briefest and baldest. You may, or may not, remember that I was destined for the Law, but shortly after you and I parted my father came to grief over a bank failure, and I was compelled to look out for some immediate means of earning a living. A situation in a commercial house in Liverpool offered itself, which I gladly accepted, and there I have been ever since, working my way up by slow but sure degrees. I am over in the States on a matter of business for my firm, which admits of my combining a little holiday-making with it. I reached here late last evening, got through my business a couple of hours ago, and am killing time while waiting to be picked up by a train going East in exactly half an hour and five minutes from now. But here we are at the depot. Won’t you alight and keep me company for my remaining thirty-five minutes? My portmanteau is in the cloakroom, or whatever they call the place in this part of the world.” Accordingly they alighted and proceeded to stroll up and down the station platform. While the other had been talking, Alec had had time to pull himself together and to decide how far he should, or should not, take Boyd into his confidence. For various reasons he would much have preferred not meeting him, but that was beyond help now; and, after all, Boyd was a gentleman and the least hint would suffice to seal his lips. “I suppose,” began Alec, with a little laugh, “that I am not the first fellow by many who has contrived to find himself at odds with his father, or whose father thought he had just cause to find fault with the error of his ways; at any rate, the pater and I came to the conclusion that we should be better apart for at least a few years to come. For a time I wandered about the Continent, leading a free-and-easy Bohemian sort of life. At length I grew tired of doing nothing, and having had a certain amount of capital placed at my command, which I was desirous of tripling, or quadrupling, as the case might be, I determined to try my fortune in the States. That was two years ago. The result, considering my utter lack of business knowledge, was only what might have been expected. I gained a certain amount of experience, it is true, but it was at the expense of half my capital. I was disheartened, but by no means despairing. Leaving the scene of my ill fortune, I came West. I had no particular object in halting even for an hour at Pineapple City, beyond being tired with a long railway journey and intolerably bored by a fellow traveller who persisted in clinging to me like a leech, and whom I was determined to get rid of at any cost. Well, I had not been here many hours before I made the acquaintance of an Englishman of the name of Travis, a gentleman by birth and education, who, like yourself, had lighted on evil days, and had been lured all this way from home in the hope of being able to make a living, and ultimately, perhaps, a competence.