“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, which was true. “I suppose I should get about twenty pounds for it.” “I will give you twenty-five,” said Sam. “Sam!” protested Peter. He approached the motive (as he understood it), but considered the offer reckless from a young man who contemplated matrimony. “Twenty-five pounds,” repeated Sam firmly. “Well,” laughed Gerald, quite unable not to laugh at the idiot’s persistence, “if you’re as keen on doing good as all that, I’ll take the offer.” “Right,” said Sam. “I’ll settle it at once.” He went to the chairman’s table and made out a form of assignment of copyright. He had a little knowledge of the law, and it was a dangerous thin--for the other fellow. But both Sam and Adams went home that night in a state of cherubic self-satisfaction. “What a game?” thought Adams. “And what an ass!” Curiously, the thoughts of Sammy Branstone were not dissimilar. He had this advantage over Adams: that Adams had read his paper and had not watched his audience all the time. Sam had watched the audience and thought twenty-five pounds a cheap price for that paper. He slept on it, and awoke next day with confidence in his investment undisturbed, but the news which awaited him at the office shook him at first. It was one thing to see a profitable side-line in the publication of Adams’ address and another to be suddenly obliged to regard the copyright of that paper as his one sound asset. He feared, in cold daylight, that it was not quite sound enough for that. Yet what had happened did not come as a complete surprise. Sam knew Travers’ habits and knew that men of his habits are liable to die suddenly. Travers had died in the night, and Sam was very angry. He told himself that he had no luck with people’s deaths. His father had died too soon for Sam, and now Travers was dead just when Sam had become engaged, and when he had undertaken a speculation which, however high his hopes of it, was after all speculative. An estate agent’s business is largely personal and, if there is no obvious successor, no heir apparent already in training for the succession, is apt to fall to pieces when its head dies. The process of disintegration in this case had set in long ago; drink had begun what death now ended; and there was no heir. Lance Travers had decided for medicine and was, on the material side, little affected by his father’s death, since Travers had bought him a practice a year earlier somewhere in the South, and the neighbourhood was proving healthily valetudinarian. The office was not a cheerful place that day. Men estimated their savings and balanced them against the probable weeks of unemployment before they found new places. A few of them, no doubt, might hope to “go with” the business to whomever bought it; and they wondered who would buy and which of them would be engaged by the purchaser.