‘You might reach that pocket-book, and ring for Mrs. Davies,’ he would say in so casual a way that of course you would ring.  On Mrs. Davies’s appearance he would be fumbling about among the papers in his pocket-book, and presently he would say, with a look of frustration that went to one’s heart—­’I’ve got a ten-pound note somewhere here for you, Mrs. Davies, to pay you up till Saturday, but somehow I seem to have lost it.  Yet it must be somewhere about.  Perhaps you’ll find it as you make the bed in the morning.  I’m so sorry to have troubled you....’

And then he would grow tired and doze a little on his pillow.

Suddenly he would be alert again, and with a startling vividness tell me strange stories from the dreamland into which he was now passing.

I had promised to see him on Monday, but had been prevented, and had wired to him accordingly.  This was Tuesday.

‘You needn’t have troubled to wire,’ he said.  ’Didn’t you know I was in London from Saturday to Monday?’

‘The doctor and Mrs. Davies didn’t know,’ he continued with the creepy cunning of the dying:  ’I managed to slip away to look at a house I think of taking—­in fact I’ve taken it.  It’s in—­in—­now, where is it?  Now isn’t that silly?  I can see it as plain as anything—­yet I cannot, for the life of me, remember where it is, or the number....  It was somewhere St. John’s Wood way ... never mind, you must come and see me there, when we get in....’

I said he was dying in debt, and thus the heaven that lay about his deathbed was one of fantastic Eldorados, sudden colossal legacies, and miraculous windfalls.

‘I haven’t told you,’ he said presently, ’of the piece of good luck that has befallen me.  You are not the only person in luck.  I can hardly expect you to believe me, it sounds so like the Arabian Nights.  However, it’s true for all that.  Well, one of the little sisters was playing in the garden a few afternoons ago, making mud-pies or something of that sort, and she suddenly scraped up a sovereign.  Presently she found two or three more, and our curiosity becoming aroused, a turn or two with the spade revealed quite a bed of gold; and the end of it was, that on further excavating, the whole garden proved to be one mass of sovereigns.  Sixty thousand pounds we counted ... and then, what do you think?—­it suddenly melted away....’

He paused for a moment, and continued, more in amusement than regret—­

’Yes—­the Government got wind of it, and claimed the whole lot as treasure-trove!

‘But not,’ he added slyly, ’before I’d paid off two or three of my biggest bills.  Yes—­and—­you’ll keep it quiet, of course,—­there’s another lot been discovered in the garden, but we shall take good care the Government doesn’t get hold of it this time, you bet.’

He told this wild story with such an air of simple conviction that, odd as it may seem, one believed every word of it.  But the tale of his sudden good-fortune was not ended.