“I understand everything, Mr. Thorold, except your object in admitting me to the scene.” “A whim!” cried Thorold vivaciously, “a freak of mine! Possibly due to the eternal and universal desire of man to show off before woman!” The journalist tried to smile, but something in her face caused Thorold to run to a chiffonier. “Drink this,” he said, returning with a glass. “I need nothing.” The voice was a whisper. “Oblige me.” Miss Fincastle drank and coughed. “Why did you do it?” she asked sadly, looking at the notes. “You don’t mean to say,” Thorold burst out, “that you are feeling sorry for Mr. Bruce Bowring? He has merely parted with what he stole. And the people from whom he stole, stole. All the activities which centre about the Stock Exchange are simply various manifestations of one primeval instinct. Suppose I had not--had not interfered. No one would have been a penny the better off except Mr. Bruce Bowring. Whereas----” “You intend to restore this money to the Consolidated?” said Miss Fincastle eagerly. “Not quite! The Consolidated doesn’t deserve it. You must not regard its shareholders as a set of innocent shorn lambs. They knew the game. They went in for what they could get. Besides, how could I restore the money without giving myself away? I want the money myself.” “But you are a millionaire.” “It is precisely because I am a millionaire that I want more. All millionaires are like that.” “I am sorry to find you a thief, Mr. Thorold.” “A thief! No. I am only direct, I only avoid the middleman. At dinner, Miss Fincastle, you displayed somewhat advanced views about property, marriage, and the aristocracy of brains. You said that labels were for the stupid majority, and that the wise minority examined the ideas behind the labels. You label me a thief, but examine the idea, and you will perceive that you might as well call yourself a thief. Your newspaper every day suppresses the truth about the City, and it does so in order to live. In other words, it touches the pitch, it participates in the game. To-day it has a fifty-line advertisement of a false balance-sheet of the Consolidated, at two shillings a line. That five pounds, part of the loot of a great city, will help to pay for your account of our interview this afternoon.” “Our interview to-night,” Miss Fincastle corrected him stiffly, “and all that I have seen and heard.” At these words she stood up, and as Cecil Thorold gazed at her his face changed. “I shall begin to wish,” he said slowly, “that I had deprived myself of the pleasure of your company this evening.” “You might have been a dead man had you done so,” Miss Fincastle retorted, and observing his blank countenance she touched the revolver. “Have you forgotten already?” she asked tartly. “Of course it wasn’t loaded,” he remarked. “Of course I had seen to that earlier in the day. I am not such a bungler----” “Then I didn’t save your life?”