His sister sighed and made a little whimpering sound. But she got up, all the same, and walked obediently towards the door. She was almost on the threshold, when she halted, turned and ran back to say good-night to Mr. Cardan. “I’m so glad,” she said, “that we found you. Such fun. Good-night. But you mustn’t look at me like that.” She put up her hand again to her face. “Oh, not like that.” And still giggling, she ran out of the room. There was a long silence. “Have some wine,” said Mr. Elver at last and pushed the flask in Mr. Cardan’s direction. Mr. Cardan replenished his glass and then, politely, did the same for his host. Wine—it was the only thing that was likely to make this dismal devil talk. With his practised and professional eye, Mr. Cardan thought he could detect in his host’s expression certain hardly perceptible symptoms of incipient tipsiness. A spidery creature like that, thought Mr. Cardan contemptuously, couldn’t be expected to hold his liquor well; and he had been putting it down pretty steadily all through supper. A little more and, Mr. Cardan was confident, he’d be as clay in the hands of a sober interrogator (and Mr. Cardan could count on being sober for at least three bottles longer than a poor feeble creature like this); he’d talk, he’d talk; the only difficulty would be to get him to stop talking. “Thanks,” said Mr. Elver, and gloomily gulped down the replenished glass. That’s the style, thought Mr. Cardan; and in his liveliest manner he began to tell the story of the grocer’s brother’s statue and of his pursuit of it, ending up with an account, already more florid than the previous version, of how he lost himself. “I console myself superstitiously,” he concluded, “by the reflection that fate wouldn’t have put me to these little troubles and inconveniences if it weren’t intending to do something handsome by me in the end. I’m paying in advance; but I trust I’m paying for something round and tidy. All the same, what a curse this, hunt for money is!” Mr. Elver nodded. “It’s the root of all evil,” he said, and emptied his glass. Unobtrusively Mr. Cardan replenished it. “Quite right,” he confirmed. “And it’s twice cursed, if you’ll allow me to play Portia for a moment: it curses him that hath—can you think of a single really rich person of your acquaintance who wouldn’t be less avaricious, less tyrannous, self-indulgent and generally porkish if he didn’t pay super-tax? And it also curses him that hath not, making him do all manner of absurd, humiliating, discreditable things which he’d never think of doing if the hedgerows grew breadfruit and bananas and grapes enough to keep one in free food and liquor.” “It curses him that hath not the most,” said Mr. Elver with a sudden savage animation. This was a subject, evidently, on which he felt deeply. He looked sharply at Mr. Cardan for a moment, then turned away to dip his long nose once more in his tumbler.