The lawyer, seeing that Kaituna had been left penniless, except for certain shares, which he truly assured her were not worth the paper they were written on, had, in a spirit of philanthropy, offered to buy those shares off her at his own price--which was a very small one--so that Miss Pethram would have something to live on. He wrote a letter--a generous and noble letter, from his point of view--in which he offered to take these undesirable shares in the Pole Star Mining Company off her hands at a great sacrifice to himself, and Mrs. Belswin had answered the letter on behalf of Kaituna in person. As she was a lady who never minced matters, however unpleasant, and moreover never exercised any self-control, Mr. Dombrain had rather a bad time of it for a quarter of an hour. He had seen that phrase in a French novel, but had never thoroughly understood its significance until Mrs. Belswin illustrated it to him in her own graphic manner. She said--oh, he hardly remembered what she said, except that she used the word "swindler" pretty often, and made several pointed allusions to the disgrace of an ex-convict exercising an honourable profession in London. Mr. Dombrain could have said something rather disagreeable to her, which would certainly have shut her up, but this modern Xantippe gave him no opportunity of saying a word. She came, she saw, she raged, stormed, crushed, conquered, and finally departed in a whirlwind of passion, telling him that Clendon was going to look after the shares in Melbourne, and that if he dared to try any tricks on her she would--she would---- Mr. Dombrain shivered when he thought of what she said she would do. Now, however, that she was out of the room, and he had collected his thoughts, scattered by her terrific onslaught, he began to think, and after several minutes of thinking and frowning, he grinned. Not a pleasant grin by any manner of means--a nasty Mephistophelean grin that boded ill to his adversary. She had been unpleasant to him; well, he could now be unpleasant to her, and in a way she wouldn't like. He constructed a little scheme in his head which he thought would answer his purpose, and was about to make a few notes relative to the same, when a card was brought in to him. "Silas P. Oates."