It was when his engagement with the merchant was about two years old that, as a matter of curiosity and more in order to kill a few idle hours than with any ulterior purpose, he took up and began to study the details of a recent mysterious robbery of bonds and securities of which his employer had been the victim, and which had baffled all the efforts of policedom to bring the criminals to justice. As it was, Winslade presently found that the task he had taken in hand had an absorbing interest for him, as also that it brought into play a certain faculty of analysis of the possession of which he had been only half conscious before, as well as a gift for the sifting of contradictory evidence and the marshalling in orderly sequence of a complicated array of apparently disconnected details, thereby enabling him to build up a theory which indicated how and where the missing clue should be looked for. The result was that Winslade succeeded in doing that which Scotland Yard had failed to effect. As a consequence, his success got talked about in certain City circles, and, a little later, he was asked to take another case in hand which so far had proved to be as great a puzzle as the previous one. Here again Phil was successful in evolving a clue which in the result proved to be the right one. Such was Mr. Layland's belief in his tutor's abilities that when Phil's engagement came to an end, in consequence of the departure of his pupils for a public school, the merchant requested him to go to the States and there carry out a certain diplomatic business commission which, for reasons of his own, he did not care to entrust to any recognised member of his staff. It was while on his voyage back to England that he encountered Miss Sudlow and her aunt, and thereby brought about a crisis in the affairs of Fanny and himself such as had entered into the dreams of neither. So unwilling was Mr. Layland to dispense with Phil's services that on his return from America he offered him an influential position in his counting-house at a liberal salary to start with, and with a promise of promotion before he should be much older. But tempting as the offer was in some ways, Phil, feeling that he had neither liking nor aptitude for a commercial career, found himself compelled to decline it. As the next best thing the merchant could do for his _protégé_, he recommended him to his friend Mr. Robert Melray, who just then happened to be in need of the services of a secretary and amanuensis. Mr. Melray had lately returned from an expedition into the interior of Borneo, and Winslade's duties consisted chiefly in transcribing his diary, together with a miscellaneous collection of notes written in all sorts of places and under all sorts of circumstances, and in working up the whole into a connected narrative of travel with a view to its proximate publication in volume form.