Rachel faced him again, leaning her hands behind her on the table, and said with the most enchanting, persuasive friendliness—­

“I wasn’t frightened—­truly!  I don’t know why I looked as though I was.”

“You mean about the revolver—­in the sitting-room?” He jumped nimbly back after her to the revolver question.

“Yes.  Because I’m quite used to revolvers, you know.  My brother had one.  Only his was a Colt—­one of those long things.”

“Your brother, eh?”

“Yes.  Did you know him?”

“I can’t say I did,” Louis replied, with some constraint.

Rachel said with generous enthusiasm—­

“He’s a wonderful shot, my brother is!”

Louis was curiously touched by the warmth of her reference to her brother.  In the daily long monotonous column of advertisements headed succinctly “Money” in the Staffordshire Signal, there once used to appear the following invitation:  “WE NEVER REFUSE a loan to a responsible applicant.  No fussy inquiries.  Distance no objection.  Reasonable terms.  Strictest privacy.  L3 to L10,000.  Apply personally or by letter.  Lovelace Curzon, 7 Colclough Street, Knype.”  Upon a day Louis had chosen that advertisement from among its rivals, and had written to Lovelace Curzon.  But on the very next day he had come into his thousand pounds, and so had lost the advantage of business relations with Lovelace Curzon.  Lovelace Curzon, as he had learnt later, was Reuben Fleckring, Rachel’s father.  Or, more accurately, Lovelace Curzon was Reuben Fleckring, junior, Rachel’s brother, a young man in a million.  Reuben, senior, had been for many years an entirely mediocre and ambitionless clerk in a large works where Julian Maldon had learnt potting, when Reuben, junior (whom he blindly adored), had dragged him out of clerkship, and set him up as the nominal registered head of a money-lending firm.  An amazing occurrence!  At that time Reuben, junior, was a minor, scarcely eighteen.  Yet his turn for finance had been such that he had already amassed reserves, and—­without a drop of Jewish blood in his veins—­possessed confidence enough to compete in their own field with the acutest Hebrews of the district.  Reuben, senior, was the youth’s tool.

In a few years Lovelace Curzon had made a mighty and terrible reputation in the world where expenditures exceed incomes.  And then the subterranean news of the day—­not reported in the Signal—­was that something serious had happened to Lovelace Curzon.  And the two Fleckrings went to America, the father, as usual, hypnotized by the son.  And they left no wrack behind save Rachel.