“Now,” said I, “talk sense.  How much can you raise?”

He went into figures and showed me that, although he stretched his credit to the utmost, there were still ten thousand pounds to be provided.

“It’s utter smash and ruin,” he groaned.  “And all my accursed folly.  I thought I was going to make a fortune.  But I’m done for now.”  Latimer is usually a pink, prosperous-looking man.  Now he was white and flabby, a piteous spectacle.  “You are executor under my will,” he continued.  “Heaven knows I’ve nothing to leave.  But you’ll see things straight for me, if anything happens?  You will look after Lucy and the kids, won’t you?”

I was on the point of undertaking to do so, in the event of the continuance of his craving for prussic acid, when I reflected upon my own approaching bow and farewell to the world where Lucy and the kids would still be wandering.  I am always being brought up against this final fireproof curtain.  Suddenly a thought came which caused me to exult exceedingly.

“Ten thousand pounds, my dear Latimer,” said I, “would save you from being hammered on the Stock Exchange and from seeking a suicide’s grave.  It would also enable you to maintain Lucy and the kids in your luxurious house at Hampstead, and to take them as usual to Dieppe next summer.  Am I not right?”

He begged me not to make a jest of his miseries.  It was like asking a starving beggar whether a dinner at the Carlton wouldn’t set him up again.

“Would ten thousand set you up?” I persisted.

“Yes.  But I might as well try to raise ten million.”

“Not so,” I cried, slapping him on the shoulder.  “I myself will lend you the money.”

He leaped to his feet and stared at me wildly in the face.  He could not have been more electrified if he had seen me suddenly adorned with wings and shining raiment.  I experienced a thrill of eumoiriety more exquisite than I had dreamed of imagining.

“You?”

“Why not?”

“You don’t understand.  I can give you no security whatsoever.”

“I don’t want security and I don’t want interest,” I exclaimed, feeling more magnanimous than I had a right to be, seeing that the interest would be of no use to me on the other side of the Styx.  “Pay me back when and how you like.  Come round with me to my bankers and I’ll settle the matter at once.”

He put out his hands; I thought he was about to fall at my feet; he laughed in a silly way and, groping after brandy and soda, poured half the contents of the brandy decanter on to the tray.  I took him in a cab, a stupefied man, to the bank, and when he left me at the door with my draft in his pocket, there were tears in his eyes.  He wrung my hand and murmured something incoherent about Lucy.

“For Heaven’s sake, don’t tell her anything about it,” I entreated.  “I love Lucy dearly, as you know; but I don’t want to have her weeping on my door-mat.”