‘Oh, brayvo!’ cried John.  ‘But why?’

‘I’ve found it out, John,’ returned his brother gently.

‘It?  What?’ enquired John.

‘Why Michael won’t compromise,’ said Morris.  ’It’s because he can’t.  It’s because Masterman’s dead, and he’s keeping it dark.’

‘Golly!’ cried the impressionable John.  ’But what’s the use?  Why does he do it, anyway?’

‘To defraud us of the tontine,’ said his brother.

‘He couldn’t; you have to have a doctor’s certificate,’ objected John.

‘Did you never hear of venal doctors?’ enquired Morris.  ’They’re as common as blackberries:  you can pick ’em up for three-pound-ten a head.’

‘I wouldn’t do it under fifty if I were a sawbones,’ ejaculated John.

‘And then Michael,’ continued Morris, ’is in the very thick of it.  All his clients have come to grief; his whole business is rotten eggs.  If any man could arrange it, he could; and depend upon it, he has his plan all straight; and depend upon it, it’s a good one, for he’s clever, and be damned to him!  But I’m clever too; and I’m desperate.  I lost seven thousand eight hundred pounds when I was an orphan at school.’

‘O, don’t be tedious,’ interrupted John.  ’You’ve lost far more already trying to get it back.’

CHAPTER II.  In Which Morris takes Action

Some days later, accordingly, the three males of this depressing family might have been observed (by a reader of G. P. R. James) taking their departure from the East Station of Bournemouth.  The weather was raw and changeable, and Joseph was arrayed in consequence according to the principles of Sir Faraday Bond, a man no less strict (as is well known) on costume than on diet.  There are few polite invalids who have not lived, or tried to live, by that punctilious physician’s orders.  ’Avoid tea, madam,’ the reader has doubtless heard him say, ’avoid tea, fried liver, antimonial wine, and bakers’ bread.  Retire nightly at 10.45; and clothe yourself (if you please) throughout in hygienic flannel.  Externally, the fur of the marten is indicated.  Do not forget to procure a pair of health boots at Messrs Dail and Crumbie’s.’  And he has probably called you back, even after you have paid your fee, to add with stentorian emphasis:  ’I had forgotten one caution:  avoid kippered sturgeon as you would the very devil.’  The unfortunate Joseph was cut to the pattern of Sir Faraday in every button; he was shod with the health boot; his suit was of genuine ventilating cloth; his shirt of hygienic flannel, a somewhat dingy fabric; and he was draped to the knees in the inevitable greatcoat of marten’s fur.  The very railway porters at Bournemouth (which was a favourite station of the doctor’s) marked the old gentleman for a creature of Sir Faraday.  There was but one evidence of personal taste, a vizarded forage cap; from this form of headpiece, since he had fled from a dying jackal on the plains of Ephesus, and weathered a bora in the Adriatic, nothing could divorce our traveller.