“At a quarter past eight, if you please. I shall be in the billiard-room, Charles,” he added, turning to the hall-porter. Sir Alfred wearied soon of the pages of his review and leaned back in his chair, his hands folded in front of him, gazing through the window at the opposite side of the way. A good many people, passing backwards and forwards, glanced at him curiously. For thirty years his had been something like a household name in the city. He had been responsible, he and the great firm of which he was the head, for international finance conducted on the soundest principles, finance which scorned speculation, finance which rolled before it the great snowball of automatically accumulated wealth. His father had been given the baronetcy which he now enjoyed, and which, as he knew very well, might at any moment be transferred into a peerage. He was a short, rather thick-set man, with firm jaws and keen blue eyes, carefully dressed in somewhat old-fashioned style, with horn-rimmed eyeglass hung about his neck with a black ribbon. His hair was a little close-cropped and stubbly. No one could have called him handsome, no one could have found him undistinguished. Even without the knowledge of his millions, people who glanced at him recognised the atmosphere of power. “Wonder what old Anselman’s thinking about,” one man asked another in an opposite corner. “Money bags,” was the prompt reply. “The man thinks money, he dreams money, he lives money. He lives like a prince but he has no pleasures. From ten in the morning till two, he sites in his office in Lombard Street, and the pulse of the city beats differently in his absence.” “I wonder!” the other murmured. Other people had wondered, too. Still the keen blue eyes looked across through the misty atmosphere at the grey building opposite. Men and women passed before him in a constant, unseen procession. No one came and spoke to him, no one interfered with his meditations. The two men who had been discussing him passed out of the room presently one of them glanced backwards in his direction. “After all, I suppose,” he observed, as he passed down the hall, “there is something great about wealth or else one wouldn’t believe that old Anselman there was thinking of his money-bags. Why, here’s Granet. Good fellow! I’d no idea you’d joined this august company of old fogies.” Granet smiled as he shook hands. “I haven’t,” he explained. “You have to be a millionaire, don’t you, and a great political bug, before they’d let you in? No place for poor soldiers! I have to be content with the Rag.” “Poor devil!” his friend remarked sympathetically,--“best cooking, best wines in London. These Service men look after themselves all right. What are you doing here, anyhow, Granet?” “I’m dining with my uncle,” Granet replied, quickly. “Sir Alfred’s in there, waiting for you,” his friend told him, indicating the door,--“he has been sitting at the window watching for you, in fact. So long!”