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what?' I answered.
    'What do you say to this? It's you I've come for.'
    'Her!' said John, in disgust.
    Gentleman nodded. 'I have something for you. A proposal.'
    'A proposal!' said Phil. He had overheard it. 'Look out, Sue, he only wants to marry you!'
    Dainty screamed, and the boys all sniggered. Gentleman blinked, then took his eyes from me at last, and leaned to Mrs Sucksby to say,
    'Get rid of our friends at the brazier, would you? But keep John and Dainty: I shall want their help.'
    Mrs Sucksby hesitated, then glanced at Mr Ibbs; and Mr Ibbs said at once, 'Right, lads, these sovs is sweated so hard, the poor queen's quite a shadder. Any more of it, we shall be done for treason.' He took up a pail, and began to drop the hot coins into the water, one by one. 'Listen to them yellow boys cry hush!' he said. 'The gold knows best. Now, what does the gold know?'
    'Go on, Uncle Humphry,' said Phil. He drew on his coat and turned up his collar. The other boys did the same. 'So long,' they said, with a nod to me, to John and Dainty and Mrs Sucksby. To Gentleman they said nothing. He watched them go by.
    'Watch your back, lads!' he called, as the door was closed behind them. We heard Phil spit again.
    Mr Ibbs turned the key in the lock. Then he came and poured himself a cup of tea—splashing rum in it, as Dainty had for Gentleman. The scent of the rum rose on the steam, to mix with the smell of the fire, the sweated gold, the dog-skins, the wet and steaming greatcoat. The rain fell softer upon the grate. John chewed on a peanut, picking shell from his tongue. Mr Ibbs had moved lamps. The table, our faces and hands, showed bright; but the rest of the room was in shadow.
    For a minute, no-one spoke. Gentleman still worried the cards, and we sat and watched him. Mr Ibbs watched him hardest of all: his eye grew narrow, and he tilted his head—he might have been lining him up along the barrel of a gun.
    'So, my son,' he said. 'What's the story?'
    Gentleman looked up.
    'The story,' he said. 'The story is this.' He took out a card, and laid it, faceup, on the table. It was the King of Diamonds. 'Imagine a man,' he said, as he did it. 'An old man—a wise man, in his own way—a gentleman scholar, in fact; but with curious habits. He lives in a certain out-of-the-way sort of house, near a certain out-of-the-way kind of village, some miles from London—never mind quite where, just now. He has a great room filled with books and prints, and cares for nothing but for them and for a work he is compiling—let's call it, a dictionary. It is a dictionary of all his books; but he has hopes for the pictures, too—has taken a mind to having them bound in fancy albums. The handling of that, however, is more than he can manage. He places a notice in a newspaper: he needs the services of—here he put down another card, next to the first: Jack of Spades—'a smart young man, to help him mount the collection; and one particular smart young man—being at that time rather too well known at the London gaming-houses, and highly desirous of a little light out-of-the-way sort of employment, bed and board provided—replies to the advertisement, is examined, and found fit.'
    'The smart young man being yourself,' said Mr Ibbs.
    'The smart young man being me. How you catch on!'
    'And the crib in the country,' said John, taken up in Gentleman's story despite his sulks, 'let's say it's busting with treasure. And you mean to force the locks, on all the cabinets and chests. You have come to Mr Ibbs for a loan of nippers and a jilt; and you want Sue—with her innocent eyes, what looks like they ain't seen butter—for your canary.'
    Gentleman tilted his head, drew in his breath and raised a finger, in a teasing sort of way. Then:
    'Cold as ice!' he said. The crib in the country is a damnable place: two hundred years old, and dark, and draughty, and mortgaged to the roof— which is leaky, by the by. Not a rug or a vase or piece of plate worth forcing so much as