Page:An African Millionaire.djvu/264

Rh Sir Charles,' he said. 'I love to see this fine old English admiration of pluck and adventure! The fellow must really have some good in him, after all. I should like to take notes of a few of those stories; they would supply nice material for basing a romance upon.'

'I hardly know whether I'm exactly the man to make the hero of a novel,' Charles murmured, with complacence. And he certainly didn't look it.

'I was thinking rather of Colonel Clay as the hero,' the poet responded coldly.

'Ah, that's the way with you men of letters,' Charles answered, growing warm. 'You always have a sneaking sympathy with the rascals.'

'That may be better,' Coleyard retorted, in an icy voice, 'than sympathy with the worst forms of Stock Exchange speculation.'

The company smiled uneasily. The railway king wriggled. Wrengold tried to change the subject hastily. But Charles would not be put down.

'You must hear the end, though,' he said. 'That’s not quite the worst. The meanest thing about the man is that he's also a hypocrite. He wrote me such a letter at the end of his last trick—here, positively here, in America.' And he proceeded to give his own version of the Quackenboss incident, enlivened with sundry imaginative bursts of pure Vandrift fancy.

When Charles spoke of Mrs. Quackenboss the poet smiled. 'The worst of married women,' he