minds that Mr. V.T. was Al, copper-bottomed—­Mrs. Crookes was the widow of a seafaring man, and lived at Liverpool, and had heard Lloyd’s rating quoted all her life—­and that they, the writer and Mrs. Dubbs, meant to see him through his troubles, though he was a little trying at his meals, for he would have butter on the table at his dinner, and he wanted two and three courses served together, and drank milk at his luncheon, like no Christian gentleman did that Mr. Crookes had ever seen.

The financier might have been amused if he could have read this letter, which contained no allusion to the material attractions of Torp Towers as a situation; for like a good many American millionaires, Mr. Van Torp had a blind spot on his financial retina.  He could deal daringly and surely with vast sums, or he could screw twice the normal quantity of work out of an underpaid clerk; but the household arithmetic that lies between the two was entirely beyond his comprehension.  He ‘didn’t want to be bothered,’ he said; he maintained that he ’could make more money in ten minutes than he could save in a year by checking the housekeeper’s accounts’; he ’could live on coffee and pie,’ but if he chose to hire the chef of the Cafe Anglais to cook for him at five thousand dollars a year he ’didn’t want to know the price of a truffled pheasant or a chaudfroid of ortolans.’  That was his way, and it was good enough for him.  What was the use of having made money if you were to be bothered?  And besides, he concluded, ’it was none of anybody’s blank blank business what he did.’

Mr. Van Torp did not hesitate to borrow similes from another world when his rather limited command of refined language was unequal to the occasion.

But at the present juncture, though his face did not change, and though he slept as soundly and had as good an appetite as usual, no words with which he was acquainted could express his feelings at all.  He had, indeed, consigned the writer of the first article to perdition with some satisfaction; but after his interview with Logotheti, when he had understood that a general attack upon him had begun, he gathered his strength in silence and studied the position with all the concentration of earnest thought which his exceptional nature could command.

He had recognised Feist’s handwriting, and he remembered the man as his partner’s former secretary.  Feist might have written the letter to Logotheti and the first article, but Van Torp did not believe him capable of raising a general hue and cry on both sides of the Atlantic.  It undoubtedly happened sometimes that when a fire had been smouldering long unseen a single spark sufficed to start the blaze, but Mr. Van Torp was too well informed as to public opinion about him to have been in ignorance of any general feeling against him, if it had existed; and the present attack was of too personal a nature to have been devised by financial rivals.  Besides, the Nickel Trust