I singled Jorian DeWitt from among the crowd of loungers on the stairs and landing between the drawing-rooms.  ’Oh, yes, Government has struck its flag to him,’ Jorian said.  ’Why weren’t you here to dine?  Alphonse will never beat his achievement of to-day.  Jenny and Carigny gave us a quarter-of-an-hour before dinner—­a capital idea!—­“VEUVE et BACHELIER.”  As if by inspiration.  No preparation for it, no formal taking of seats.  It seized amazingly—­floated small talk over the soup beautifully.’

I questioned him again.

‘Oh, dear, yes; there can’t be a doubt about it,’ he answered, airily.  ‘Roy Richmond has won his game.’

Two or three urgent men round a great gentleman were extracting his affable approbation of the admirable nature of the experiment of the Chassediane before dinner.  I saw that Eckart was comfortably seated, and telling Jorian to provide for him in the matter of tobacco, I went to my room, confused beyond power of thought by the sensible command of fortune my father, fortune’s sport at times, seemed really to have.

His statement of the circumstances bewildered me even more.  He was in no hurry to explain them; when we met next morning he waited for me to question him, and said, ‘Yes.  I think we have beaten them so far!’ His mind was pre-occupied, he informed me, concerning the defence of a lady much intrigued against, and resuming the subject:  ’Yes, we have beaten them up to a point, Richie.  And that reminds me:  would you have me go down to Riversley and show the squire the transfer paper?  At any rate you can now start for Sarkeld, and you do, do you not?  To-day:  to-morrow at latest.’

I insisted:  ‘But how, and in what manner has this money been paid?’ The idea struck me that he had succeeded in borrowing it.

’Transferred to me in the Bank, and intelligence of the fact sent to Dettermain and Newson, my lawyers,’ he replied.  ’Beyond that, I know as little as you, Richie, though indubitably I hoped to intimidate them.  If,’ he added, with a countenance perfectly simple and frank, ’they expect me to take money for a sop, I am not responsible, as I by no means provoked it, for their mistake.

‘I proceed.  The money is useful to you, so I rejoice at it.’

Five and twenty thousand pounds was the amount.

‘No stipulation was attached to it?’

’None.  Of course a stipulation was implied:  but of that I am not bound to be cognizant.’

‘Absurd!’ I cried:  ‘it can’t have come from the quarter you suspect.’

‘Where else?’ he asked.

I thought of the squire, Lady Edbury, my aunt, Lady Sampleman, Anna Penrhys, some one or other of his frantic female admirers.  But the largeness of the amount, and the channel selected for the payment, precluded the notion that any single person had come to succour him in his imminent need, and, as it chanced, mine.

Observing that my speculations wavered, he cited numerous instances in his life of the special action of Providence in his favour, and was bold enough to speak of a star, which his natural acuteness would have checked his doing before me, if his imagination had not been seriously struck.