"Well, I don't want to dig into your confidences, and I don't want to give you advice. If I did, I'd say make it up with her. You know very well, Rochy, you have led her the deuce of a dance. Your sister got me on about it the other night at the Vernons'. We had a long talk about you, Rochy, and we agreed you were the best of chaps, but too much given to gaiety and promiscuous larks. You should have heard me holding forth. But, joking apart, it's time you and I settled down, old chap. You can't put old heads on young shoulders, but our shoulders ain't so young as they used to be, Rochy. And I want to tell you this, if you don't hitch up again in harness, the other party will do a bolt. I'm dead serious. It's not the thing to say to another man, but you and I haven't any secrets between us, and we've always been pretty plain one to the other--well, this is what I want to say, and just take it as it's meant. Maniloff is after her. You know that chap, the _attache_ at the Russian Embassy, chap like a billiard marker, always at the other end of a cigarette--other name's Boris. Hasn't a penny to bless himself with. I know he hasn't, for I've made kind enquiries about him through Lewis, reason why--he wanted to buy one of my racers for export to Roosia. Seven hundred down and the balance in six months. Lewis served up his past to me on a charger. The chap's rotten with debt, divorced from his wife, and a punter at Monte Carlo. That's his real profession, and card playing. He's a sleepy Slav, and if he was told his house was on fire he'd say, "nichevo," meaning it don't matter, it's well insured--if he had a house to insure, which he hasn't. But women like him, he's that sort. But Heaven help the woman that marries him. He'd take her money and herself off to Monte, and when he'd broken her heart and spoiled her life and spent her coin, he'd leave her, and go off and be Russian _attache_ in Japan or somewhere. I know him. Don't let her do it, Rochy." "But how am I to help it?" asked the perplexed Jones, who saw the meaning of the other. It did not matter in reality to him, whether a woman whom he had only seen once were to "bolt" with a Russian and find ruination at Monte Carlo, but this world is not entirely a world of reality, and he felt a surprisingly strong resentment at the idea of the girl in the Victoria "bolting" with a Russian. It will be remembered that in Collins' office, the lawyer's talk about his "wife" had almost decided him to throw down his cards and quit. This shadowy wife, first mentioned by the bird woman, had, in fact, been the one vaguely felt insuperable obstacle in the way of his grand determination to make good where Rochester had failed, to fight Rochester's battles, to be the Earl of Rochester permanently maybe, or, failing that, to retire and vanish back to the States with honourable pickings.