Page:A Gentleman's Gentleman.djvu/102



"And there won't be, if we go on as we're doing now."

"Exactly; that's what I mean to do. Would I be advertising myself on the hoardings? Is it a child in long clothes that I am, Hildebrand?"

I said nothing, for it was plain that he was working himself up into one of his tempers. He'd been hard enough to bear with since we said good-by to Janet Oakley; but Sir Nicolas Steele was worth five hundred pounds a year to me, one way and the other, and you can stand a bit of temper at that price. I knew that he would think over what I said to him, and so it turned out; for a month went and he lived like a parson. Then, all of a sudden, came the business of the golden egg—and that's the story I write about.

The affair happened quite suddenly, as I say. He had been to Trouville with Jack Ames, and had lost a good deal of money, I knew. Ames was a long-nosed painting man, who lived on what he could get by finding fault with other people's pictures. He had nice manners, though; and I will say that he was a wonder with a billiard cue. Many's the mug he's skinned in this very Hôtel de Lille. I could have cried every time I saw my master going up to the billiard-room with him—and yet a prettier pair to play a four-handed match you'd never find. Ames it was who introduced Sir Nicolas to the theatricals of the Bouffes Parisiens; and what with giving dinners here and picnics there, the thousand we had made in Derbyshire soon looked thin enough.