"Penniless beggars like me don't marry beautiful wives like--like Miss Farrow," he said with a sort of savagery. "They want men with pots and pots of money, who can buy them motor-cars and diamonds, and all the rest of it." His voice was hurt and angry. Christine looked puzzled. She walked on a little way silently. Then: "I shouldn't mind how poor a man was if I loved him," she said. Jimmy looked down at her. Her face was half-hidden by the soft brown fur she wore, but he could just get a glimpse of dark lashes against her pale cheek, and the dainty outline of forehead and cheek. "You won't always think that," he told her cynically. "Some day, when you're older and wiser than you are now, you'll find yourself looking at the L. s. d. side of a man, Christine." "I never shall," she cried out indignantly. "Jimmy, you are horrid!" But Jimmy Challoner did not smile. "Women are all the same," he told her darkly. Oh, he was very, very young indeed, was Jimmy Challoner! CHAPTER IV JIMMY GETS NEWS There was a letter from the "Great Horatio" on Jimmy's plate the following morning. Jimmy looked at the handwriting and the foreign stamp and grimaced. The Great Horatio seldom wrote unless something were the matter. He was a good many years older than Jimmy, and Jimmy held him in distinct awe. He finished his breakfast before he even thought of breaking the seal, then he took up the letter and carried it over with him to the fire. Jimmy Challoner was breakfasting in his dressing-gown. It was very seldom that he managed to get entirely dressed by the time breakfast was ready. He sat down now in a big chair and stuck his slippered feet out to the warmth. He turned his brother's letter over and over distastefully. What the deuce did the old chap want now? he wondered. He gave a sigh of resignation, and broke open the flap. He and the Great Horatio had not met for two years. Horatio Ferdinand Challoner, to give him his full name, was a man whose health, or, rather, ill-health, was his hobby. All his life he had firmly believed himself to be in a dying state; all his life he had lived more or less at Spas, or on the Riviera, or at health resorts of some kind or another. He was a nervous, irritable man, as unlike Jimmy as it is possible for two brothers to be. For the past two years he had been living in Australia. He had undertaken the voyage at the suggestion of some new doctor whose advice he had sought, and he had been so ill during the six weeks' voyage that, so far, he had never been able to summon sufficient pluck to start home again. Jimmy had roared with laughter when he heard; he could so well imagine his brother's disgust and fear. As a matter of fact, it suited Jimmy very well that the head of the family should be so far removed from him. He hated supervision; he liked to feel that he had got a free hand; that he need not go in fear of running up against Horatio Ferdinand at every street corner.