He rose from the chair and began to walk up and down the room in evident perplexity.  “If only,” he said, “I had twenty-five thousand, I would take up the mortgages myself and foreclose at my leisure.  It would be a good investment at that figure, even as things are, and besides, I should like to have that place.  Twenty-five thousand, only twenty-five thousand, and now when I want it I have not got it.  And I should have had it if it had not been for that tiger, that devil Edith.  She has had more than that out of me in the last ten years, and still she is threatening and crying for more, more, more.  Tiger; yes, that is the name for her, her own name, too.  She would coin one’s vitals into money if she could.  All Belle’s fortune she has had, or nearly all, and now she wants another five hundred, and she will have it too.

“Here we are,” and he drew a letter from his pocket written in a bold, but somewhat uneducated, woman’s hand.

“Dear Bill,” it ran, “I’ve been unlucky again and dropped a pot.  Shall want 500 pounds by the 1st October.  No shuffling, mind; money down; but I think that you know me too well to play any more larx.  When can you tear yourself away, and come and give your E——­ a look?  Bring some tin when you come, and we will have times.—­Thine, The Tiger.”

“The Tiger, yes, the Tiger,” he gasped, his face working with passion and his grey eyes glinting as he tore the epistle to fragments, threw them down and stamped on them.  “Well, be careful that I don’t one day cut your claws and paint your stripes.  By heaven, if ever a man felt like murder, I do now.  Five hundred more, and I haven’t five thousand clear in the world.  Truly we pay for the follies of our youth!  It makes me mad to think of those fools Cossey and Son forcing that place into the market just now.  There’s a fortune in it at the price.  In another year or two I might have recovered myself—­that devil of a woman might be dead—­and I have several irons in the fire, some of which are sure to turn up trumps.  Surely there must be a way out of it somehow.  There’s a way out of everything except Death if only one thinks enough, but the thing is to find it,” and he stopped in his walk opposite to the window that looked upon the street, and put his hand to his head.

As he did so he caught sight of the figure of a tall gentleman strolling idly towards the office door.  For a moment he stared at him blankly, as a man does when he is trying to catch the vague clue to a new idea.  Then, as the figure passed out of his view, he brought his fist down heavily upon the sill.

“Edward Cossey, by George!” he said aloud.  “There’s the way out of it, if only I can work him, and unless I have made a strange mistake, I think I know the road.”