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Rh somewhere in the neighbourhood. Professor Marlow, quite unknown to himself, was acting the part of the mongoose to a financial cobra just raising its head to strike, and of this stroke Lord Stranleigh would have been the victim.

The capable Professor, innocent, unsuspicious, kindly, went on to relate complimentary things that had been said of Lord Stranleigh which he thought it would please that young man to hear, neither of them in the least dreaming that they were planting dynamite under one of the shrewdest schemes of spoliation that unscrupulous brains had ever concocted in the City of London.

"As I told you," Bronson Marlow went on, "I am a member of the Scientific Society's Club. London, as you know, is full of clubs, each organised for a definite object; social, political, literary, sporting, scientific, or what-not. It is a remarkable thing that there filter into all clubs certain men who to outward appearance have not the least qualification for membership, and this anomaly the Scientific Society's Club has not escaped. One of our prominent members is a gross, fat man, named Isador Isaacstein, who, whatever his attainments may be, is quite innocent of even a smattering of science."

"I have heard of him," said Stranleigh. "He is a financier of more or less prominence in the city of London. He came from Frankfort, I believe,