‘I’d be sorry to stop you,’ said Sir Charles, ‘but I’m afraid I can’t claim it. Archæology don’t help with arithmetic. As an eminent classical scholar once observed, I’ve not got the low cunning that makes a mathematician. The only thing I could think of was to insure the chances of each bet appropriately, but it seemed to me that you would regard such insurance as being in itself a bet.’ ‘I certainly should. You don’t change a thing by changing its name. You are limited to the two bets, and I shall not allow four even if you call two of them insurance. Come now, Jimmy, have you profited sufficiently by your racing experiences to have won the prize to-night?’ ‘Profited by my racing experiences?’ said the Hon. James Feldane wearily. ‘If you’d go and talk to the bank that has charge of my overdraft you wouldn’t use words like those. But backing horses, though it’s a mug’s game, is, at any rate, easy. There are too many complications in Leonard’s fancy work for a simple child of Nature like myself. I can’t engineer a two-cylinder gamble with a double back-jump actuated by the cam-shaft. The only man I know who could face it without mental overstrain is my bookmaker. He’s a wonder. He’d give you fifteen different ways of perforating this problem inside a minute. No juggle with figures can beat him. I don’t know if you’d call it a talent or a disease, but I’ve not got it. As a competitor, I’ve failed, but I don’t mind admitting that I’ve made a little actual money out of the competition.’ Jimmy smiled reminiscently. ‘May we have the details?’ asked the chairman. ‘I’d sooner you got them from Hesseltine.’ The chairman called upon Mr Hesseltine. ‘I don’t wonder,’ said that young man, ‘that Jimmy don’t like to tell you. If I’d stolen money from a crossing-sweeper in St James’s Street I shouldn’t be proud of it myself. The silly ass thinks he’s scored off me, but as I was out to lose a quid anyhow——’ ‘May we have the actual facts?’ suggested the chairman. ‘Certainly. I was thinking about this problem and I got a sudden brain-wave. I saw how to do the first half—to win a bet of a pound that would leave me one pound down when I’d won it. Well, I happened to be going up St James’s Street with Jimmy later that morning, and by way of leading up to it I asked him what he generally gave to a street-beggar. “Nix,” he said. “What do you?” So I told him that I generally gave a sovereign. He told me in his coarse sort of way that he didn’t believe it. That was what I had expected. “All right,” I said, “I’ll bet you a pound that I give two golden sovereigns to the next beggar or crossing-sweeper I come across.” He thought about it and then said: “I’ll take that, and to guard against accidents I’ll be the next beggar. Give me a little assistance, kind sir?”