Percival Nowell dropped in upon his father that night, and smoked his cigar in the dingy little parlour, which was so crowded with divers kinds of merchandise as to be scarcely habitable.  The old man’s son came here almost every evening, and behaved altogether in a very dutiful way.  Jacob Nowell seemed to tolerate rather than to invite his visits, and the adventurer tried in vain to get at the real feelings underlying that emotionless manner.

“I think I might work round the governor if I had time,” this dutiful son said to himself, as he reflected upon the aspect of affairs in Queen Anne’s Court; “but I fancy the old chap has taken his ticket for the next world—­booked through—­per express train, and the chances are that he’ll keep his word and not leave me sixpence.  Rather hard lines that, after my taking the trouble to come over here and hunt him up.”

There was one fact that Mr. Nowell the younger seemed inclined to ignore in the course of these reflections; and that was the fact that he had not left America until he had completely used up that country as a field for commercial enterprise, and had indeed made his name so far notorious in connection with numerous shady transactions as to leave no course open to him except a speedy departure.  Since his coming to England he had lived entirely on credit; and, beyond the fine clothes he wore and the contents of his two portmanteaus, he possessed nothing in the world.  It was quite true that he had done very well in New York; but his well-being had been secured at the cost of other people; and after having started some half-dozen speculations, and living extravagantly upon the funds of his victims, he was now as poor as he had been when he left Belgium for America, the commission-agent of a house in the iron trade.  In this position he might have prospered in a moderate way, and might have profited by the expensive education which had given him nothing but showy agreeable manners, had he been capable of steadiness and industry.  But of these virtues he was utterly deficient, possessing instead a genius for that kind of swindling which keeps just upon the safe side of felony.  He had lived pleasantly enough, for many years, by the exercise of this agreeable talent; so pleasantly indeed that he had troubled himself very little about his chances of inheriting his father’s savings.  It was only when he had exhausted all expedients for making money on “the other side” that he turned his thoughts in the direction of Queen Anne’s Court, and began to speculate upon the probability of Jacob Nowell’s good graces being worth the trouble of cultivation.  The prospectuses which he had shown his father were mere waste paper, the useless surplus stationery remaining from a scheme that had failed to enlist the sympathies of a Transatlantic public.  But he fancied that his only chance with the old man lay in an assumption of prosperity; so he carried matters with a high hand throughout the business, and swaggered in the little dusky parlour behind the shop just as he had swaggered on New-York Broadway or at Delmonico’s in the heyday of his commercial success.