Never mind me," interrupted Anthony. about this Frenchman of yours.'

"Tell us

"He's not a Frenchman," answered Forsberg. "French Huguenot name, but as English as you are. His father was one of the last Spitalfields silk-weavers. I've been seeing something, yesterday and to-day, of what his accumulator can do. He's got an old ramshackle car down there, and he says he'll have her fitted up by to-morrow, and then he'll take us out and run her till she stops. And afterwards we can pull her to bits ourselves, if we like."

"That's good," said Anthony, "-as far as it goes."

"It'll go further than you begin to guess, Le Dane. But he makes very curious proposals as to terms,' continued Forsberg. 'He'll make it as easy as he can for us to gamble with his battery, if we'll undertake also to speculate in him.” "How's that?" asked Anthony.

"For the first ten years he'll be content with a very small royalty-"

Forsberg named a percentage which made Anthony open his eyes at the inventor's moderation.

"If we will guarantee him four hundred a year for ten years. His story," said Forsberg, "is interesting. Three years ago Bedgold offered five thousand pounds for his secret -to buy it outright. All the prestige as well as the profit was to be Bedgold's. Delorme refused. To encourage him, his wife's father died and left him a little money; so, against a pretty tough combination of bad luck and bad health, he managed to struggle on. All these years he hasn't worried— neither he nor his wife. He's improved the battery-thirty per cent., he says. He showed me the Bedgold correspondence, and he's still proud of his refusal."

"I don't wonder," said Anthony;

tion is cannibal.”

"that man's reputa

"All the same," continued Forsberg, "he says he's sorry now he didn't take the money. He's at the back end of his capital, and his wife's given him a new interest in things."

'What's that?" asked Bethune.

And the man says

the storage-battery is nothing to what he can do both in that line and others, now he's got this son to work for. But just as it will double his energy, so it will double his anxiety."

"And he wants us to keep the worry of butcher's bills off him for ten years," asked Anthony, "while he gaily goes on inventing? Well, I suppose we get first call on his future

"That's it," ," cried Forsberg. "And when you've had that trip with his accumulators to drive you, and when you've seen something of the man, I believe you'll be as anxious as I am to keep the fellow in your pocket.

It's odd-about the child making all that difference to the man," said Anthony.

"I guess it's common enough," Forsberg answered carelessly. "Primary instinct not yet quite eradicated by civilization. It's not interesting me much."

"It does me, rather," said Anthony. "Because every woman has, or is supposed to have, this protective passion which they call parental love. She generally knows and shows it on and off from her first doll upwards. And old maids know they have missed something. But a man seems to know nothing about it, till someone shows him a baby and tells him it is his. Then the feeling jumps on his neck, or takes him by the throat, and he can't think why he wants to make a fool of himself."

"How do you come by your knowledge?" asked Bethune. "Second hand-if it is knowledge," replied the boy, smiling. "A Tyneside rivetter told me something like that -and another man. What do you think, Mr Bethune?"

"My judgment would depend as much on hearsay as your evidence," said Bethune. But I think you are wrong on one point. Old bachelors sometimes have moments when they find life a bit of a frost, you know-from reasons not unlike those of your old maids.'

Aren't you offering evidence after all, Mr Bethune?" asked Forsberg.

"I'm afraid I was," admitted Bethune, laughing.

And I'm afraid it's evidence I can't allow," said Anthony. "Mr Bethune's much too young to give it. But I'll offer you both something better than evidences of primæval instincts." 'What's that?" asked Forsberg.

"Lunch at the Four V.s," said Anthony. "That's the latest thing in clubs, sir," he explained. "At least I am on the original committee. It's the Four Universities Club. Nobody eligible but members of Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard or Yale. There are clubs in New York, Boston, and

London, and they are very closely affiliated-in fact they are one institution. You may change the sky and run across the sea-you can even change your mind, and yet find your club the same. It's a good idea-I'm not quite sure whether it's a good club. But it has, in Sackville Street at least, a jolly good cook. Forsberg's a member."

But Forsberg would not join them. So Anthony took only Randolph Bethune out to lunch.

CHAPTER XII

THE BALL IS SET ROLLING

"THE club ought to succeed," said Anthony, as they sat down; "if only from its mixture. Sport, scholarship, law, journalism, drama, business, and even a dash of politics —and so far, a fairly representative selection. Of course there are one or two that ought never to have got in. But there was less knowledge than caution at the start, I'm afraid."

He ordered the lunch and chose the wine; and the pair, taking little interest in those eating at the tables about them, proceeded to enjoy the meal and each other's company.

The sympathy established so quickly was of different apparent origin in the two minds. Anthony could have told no more than that Bethune's personality appealed to him strongly, while he admired his record, delighted in his conversation, and agreed with many of his opinions.

With Bethune the case was less simple. To the keenness of Anthony's intelligence, the freshness of his youth, the simple charm of his good looks and perfect bearing, were added two further forces of attraction. And these the elder man's more reflective habit had attempted to define.

It was not Bethune's fault that his life had taught him to distrust the enthusiast. It was perhaps his merit that he could still believe in enthusiasm. And in Anthony he had found a man whose heart was the dwelling-place of an enthusiasm that was virgin. And this maiden passion, thought Bethune, would never cry itself on the pavements-would never unclasp the zone encircling its heavy vesture of reserve, until occasion should come like a bridegroom with promise of fruition.

And beyond this was yet another force drawing him to the lad. Anthony had reminded him, as has been suggested, of a face unseen and unforgotten for more than twenty years.

The likeness of one human countenance to another is among the commonest puzzles of life-even as it is one of the most evasive of life's mysteries. To the casual Western observer two Chinamen, separated by age, station, geography

and descent, are as twin brothers. And no two men, perhaps, are more unlike in the eyes of children and wives, than brothers of one birth; whom yet their outer ring of acquaintance will mistake for each other.

And it was while this middle-aged man and the young one ate their lunch together, taking in each other's company so much pleasure that neither knew what his food might be; and while one of them, in every mental pause was looking, not once nor twice only, for the likeness which he would find but to lose again, that the remarkable resemblance between the two dark, keen, aquiline faces, bent towards each other across the table, and silhouetted against the corner window of the club dining-room, was observed and discussed by four men, of whom three had never till now seen Randolph Bethune nor Anthony Le Dane.

At a square table in the middle of the room these four men sat. Three were young-young enough, at least, to be proud of eating publicly in company of the fourth. The fourth was older than he thought the three believed him. But they certainly gave him credit for seniority sufficient to leave hope to their vanity of being one day as wise in their generation as Alexander Beldover was generally accounted in his.

The healthy majority, indeed, of the new club, was disposed to dislike the man, whose knowledge of several worlds they held more amusing than respectable. That he had once been at Keble; that he had left it with great éclat of scholarship as well as some things less prized by that pious foundation; that he was an offshoot of a great house; that he wore good coats in a circle where good coats are necessary; that his name was not seldom chronicled in vulgar reports of gatherings in smart society, were things known. But that he lived by as well as in such dazzling company was suspected by only a few. Yet by many who had happily something more substantial than their own for support, Beldover was said to live by his wits.

It was, in fact, by playing service-pipe to the flow of scandal between the witless wantonness of one stratum of society and the thirsty ineptitude of three others that this remarkable man sometimes paid for the good coats which were the implements of his trade.

His betrayals of a clique which, foolish and unclean as it was, would, had it known its own use to him, have cast him out as uncleaner than itself, were discharged into a reservoir