Duncombe's eyebrows were slightly raised. He looked at me keenly. "Dear me!" he exclaimed. "I took it for granted that you knew the story. He is the Welsh miner's orphan, who inherited two and a quarter million from Jacob Dompers of New York. A nice little windfall for a cub like this, isn't it?" I remembered reading the story in the newspapers some years ago. So did Leonard. "What about his relatives?" the latter asked. "The only one with whom I have had any communication," Duncombe replied, "was a Welsh Baptist Minister who declined to have anything to say to the young man, and who wrote me on half a sheet of brown grocery paper, pointing out by means of many Biblical texts that no person with a banking account could hope to escape the flames of the bottomless pit." "Who placed the boy in your charge, then?" I enquired. "The London agents for the New York solicitors. I answered an advertisement. I think they realise," he went on, "that I have done my best. I have tried to fit him for one or two professions, in vain." "How long have you had him?" Leonard asked. Duncombe's long fingers played for a moment with his small black moustache. There was a quick light in his eyes as he glanced towards Leonard. "Three years this June," he answered. "Then he was sixteen when he came to you?" Duncombe assented with a little motion of his head. "You probably think that he is backward now for nineteen," he said. "You should have seen him when he came to me." "I suppose he is backward," I admitted, "and yet, to tell you the truth, I should have thought him older." "His twentieth birthday is this week," Duncombe told us. "I am getting a thousand a year and my expenses for looking after him, and I haven't any prospects of a job when he is out of my hands, but I wish to heavens it was his twenty-first!--I suppose we ought to see what the others are doing." We made our way out into the hall, which was the main living room of the Grange. Arthur was playing billiards with Lethwaite, playing sullenly and without interest, and turning around after every stroke to listen to the conversation between Rose and the other two girls, who were seated upon a lounge, watching. Lethwaite, just as we appeared, went out with a stroke which was an obvious fluke. Arthur flung half a crown across the table and put up his cue ill-humoredly. "Beastly fluke!" he grumbled. "No one can play against such luck." He strode over with his hands in his pockets to where Rose was seated. Miss Duncombe watched him approach with a sombre light in her dark eyes. "Bad-tempered again, Arthur?" she observed. "He's a rotten fluker," the young man rejoined surlily. "He wins all my pocket money."