“Thank you, no. I think it best that you should be seen alone in the automobile if there have been rumors regarding your position down in the city. If anyone asks you what the machine cost, you can tell them its price is a net two thousand pounds. You will journey in that, and I shall take the twopenny tube, being a democratic sort of person. Good morning, Mr. Schwartz-brod, good morning.” So Lord Stranleigh went down the huge lift at the twopenny tube, and in due time emerged to daylight at the Bank of England. He arrived in the anteroom a few minutes before the time of his appointment, and exactly at the arranged moment was called for, and ushered into the presence, for punctuality is the politeness of kings, and--governors of the Bank of England. The stern, almost commanding attitude of this monarch of finance abashed the young man, and made him feel the useless worm of the dust Schwartzbrod had indicated he was. Stranleigh, who was always more scrupulously polite to a beggar than was his custom with the king, resented the sensation of inferiority which came upon him when confronted with the forbidding ruler of the bank. He said to himself: “Good Heavens, is it possible that if I meet a man who is big enough, I shall actually cringe in my soul as Schwartzbrod does with his body?” Nevertheless, that slight hesitation in speech which was apt to incommode him at critical moments overpowered him now, and his dislike of any attempt to win the respect of the iron man before him sent him in the other direction, and he knew that for the next ten minutes he was going to be regarded as the most hopeless fool in London. Yet he did not consider himself a fool, and his latent sense of humor prevented him from making any attempt at endowing his conversation with that wisdom which seemed so suitable to this somber room. When the governor’s secretary had presented Lord Stranleigh’s letter to him, the head of the bank had peremptorily refused to waste time with a member of the aristocracy of whom he knew nothing, but the secretary, whose business it was to know everything, dropped one word in a short phrase that arrested the governor’s attention. “It’s the _rich_ Lord Stranleigh, sir.”