“Don’t you think, Mr. Kimberley,” asked Mr. Ragshaw, with profound respect, “that a little something——­”

They were outside the Windgall Arms, and Kimberley understood.

“Why, yes, sir,” he said; “but I never keep it in the ’ouse, and having had to pay a tailor’s bill this week, I don’t happen——­”

“My dear sir, allow me!” said Ragshaw, with genuine emotion.

The champagne, the dinner that followed, the interviews with pressmen, the excitement and obsequiousness of everybody, conveyed to Kimberley’s mind, in a dizzy sort of a way, that he was somebody in the world, and ought to be proud of it.  But his long life of servitude, his shyness and want of nerve, all weighed heavily upon him, and he was far from being happy.

Mr. Begg, senior partner of Messrs. Begg, Batter, and Bagg, was sitting in his office a day or two later when a clerk ushered in the Earl of Windgall.

“What’s this news about Gallowbay, Begg?  Is it true?” asked the earl.

“It is certainly true,” answered Begg.

“What sort of fellow is this Kimberley?”

“Well, he seems to be a shy little man, gauche, and—­and—­underbred, even for his late position.”

“That’s a pity.  I should like to see him,” added the grey little nobleman.  “I suppose you will act for him as you did for poor young Edward?”

Poor young Edward was the deceased minor whose early death had wrecked the finest chances the Windgall family craft had ever carried.

“I suppose so,” said Begg.

“I presume,” said the earl, “that even if he wanted to call in his money you could arrange elsewhere?”

“With regard to the first mortgage?” asked Mr. Begg.  “Certainly.”

“And what about the new arrangement?” asked the earl nervously.

“Impossible, I regret to say.”

“Very well,” returned the earl, with a sigh.  “I suppose the timber must go.  If poor Edward had lived, it would all have been very different.”

Next day, when Kimberley, preposterously overdressed and thoroughly ashamed of himself, was trying to talk business in Mr. Begg’s office, the Earl of Windgall was announced.  There was nothing in the world that could have terrified him more.  And when the father of his ideal love, Lady Ella Santerre, shook him by the hand, he could only gasp and gurgle in response.  But the earl’s manner gradually reassured him, and in a little time he began to plume himself in harmless trembling vanity upon sitting in the same room with a nobleman and a great lawyer.

“I am pleased to have met Mr. Kimberley,” said the earl, in going; “and I trust we shall see more of each other.”

Mr. Kimberley flushed, and bowed in a violent flutter.

As the earl was driven homeward he could not help feeling that he was engaged in a shameful enterprise.  People would talk if he invited this gilded little snob to Shouldershott Castle, and would know very well why he was asked there.  Let them talk.