“Bandying words!  I’m a jolly good mind—­”

“Come up,” said a Voice, and Mr. Marvel was suddenly whirled about and started marching off in a curious spasmodic manner.  “You’d better move on,” said the mariner.  “Who’s moving on?” said Mr. Marvel.  He was receding obliquely with a curious hurrying gait, with occasional violent jerks forward.  Some way along the road he began a muttered monologue, protests and recriminations.

“Silly devil!” said the mariner, legs wide apart, elbows akimbo, watching the receding figure.  “I’ll show you, you silly ass—­hoaxing me!  It’s here—­on the paper!”

Mr. Marvel retorted incoherently and, receding, was hidden by a bend in the road, but the mariner still stood magnificent in the midst of the way, until the approach of a butcher’s cart dislodged him.  Then he turned himself towards Port Stowe.  “Full of extra-ordinary asses,” he said softly to himself.  “Just to take me down a bit—­that was his silly game—­It’s on the paper!”

And there was another extraordinary thing he was presently to hear, that had happened quite close to him.  And that was a vision of a “fist full of money” (no less) travelling without visible agency, along by the wall at the corner of St. Michael’s Lane.  A brother mariner had seen this wonderful sight that very morning.  He had snatched at the money forthwith and had been knocked headlong, and when he had got to his feet the butterfly money had vanished.  Our mariner was in the mood to believe anything, he declared, but that was a bit too stiff.  Afterwards, however, he began to think things over.

The story of the flying money was true.  And all about that neighbourhood, even from the august London and Country Banking Company, from the tills of shops and inns—­doors standing that sunny weather entirely open—­money had been quietly and dexterously making off that day in handfuls and rouleaux, floating quietly along by walls and shady places, dodging quickly from the approaching eyes of men.  And it had, though no man had traced it, invariably ended its mysterious flight in the pocket of that agitated gentleman in the obsolete silk hat, sitting outside the little inn on the outskirts of Port Stowe.

It was ten days after—­and indeed only when the Burdock story was already old—­that the mariner collated these facts and began to understand how near he had been to the wonderful Invisible Man.

CHAPTER XV

THE MAN WHO WAS RUNNING

In the early evening time Dr. Kemp was sitting in his study in the belvedere on the hill overlooking Burdock.  It was a pleasant little room, with three windows—­north, west, and south—­and bookshelves covered with books and scientific publications, and a broad writing-table, and, under the north window, a microscope, glass slips, minute instruments, some cultures, and scattered bottles of reagents.  Dr. Kemp’s solar lamp was lit, albeit the sky was still bright with the sunset light, and his blinds were up because there was no offence of peering outsiders to require them pulled down.  Dr. Kemp was a tall and slender young man, with flaxen hair and a moustache almost white, and the work he was upon would earn him, he hoped, the fellowship of the Royal Society, so highly did he think of it.