However, with youth—­so he was pleased to flatter me—­to lend him the sap of energy, why who knows?  And in a moment he had us both akindle with his imaginations of what might—­“might”! what a word to use!—­no! what, without question, must lie unsunned in those dark underground vaults, barricaded with all that deviltry of vegetation, and guarded by the coils of a three-headed dragon with carbuncles for eyes—­eyes that never slept—­for the advantage of three heads to treasure-guarding dragons, he explained, was that they divided the twenty-four hours into watches of eight hours each as the ugly beast kept ward over that heap of gold—­bars of it, drifts of it, banks of it minted into gleaming coins—­doubloons, doubloons, doubloons—­so that the darkness was bright as day with the shine of it, or as the bottom of the sea, where a Spanish galleon lies sunk among the corals and the gliding water snakes.

“O King!” I laughed, “but indeed you have the heart of a child!”

“To-morrow,” he announced, “to-morrow we shall begin—­there is not a moment to lose.  We will send Samson with a message to your captain—­there is no need for you to go yourself; time is too precious—­and in a week, who knows but that Monte Cristo shall seem like a pauper and a penny gaff in comparison with the fantasies of our fearful wealth.  Even Calypso’s secret hoard will pale before the romance of our subterranean millions—­I mean billions—­and poor Henry Tobias will need neither hangman’s rope nor your friend Webster’s cartridges for his quietus.  At the mere rumour of our fortune, he will suddenly turn a green so violent that death will be instantaneous.”

So, for that evening, all was laughingly decided.  In a week’s time, it was agreed, we should have difficulty in recognising each other.  We should be so disguised in cloth of gold, and so blinding to look upon with rings and ropes of pearls.  As our dear “King” got off something like this for our good-night, my eyes involuntarily fell upon his present garments—­far from being cloth of gold.  Why?  I wondered.  There was no real financial reason, it was evident, for these penitential rags.  But I remembered that I had known two other millionaires—­millionaires not merely of the imagination—­whom it had been impossible to separate from a certain beloved old coat that had been their familiar for more than twenty years.  It was some odd kink somewhere in the make-up of the “King,” one more trait of his engaging humanity.

When we met at breakfast next morning, glad to see one another again as few people are at breakfast, it was evident that, so far as the “King” was concerned, our dream had lost nothing in the night watches.  On the contrary, its wings had grown to an amazing span and iridescence.  It was so impatient for flight, that its feet had to be chained to the ground—­the wise Calypso’s doing—­with a little plain prose, a detail or two of preliminary arrangement, and then....