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172 on a plate, and in a breath he had wolfed two of them. He had broken the third, and was putting half of it into his mouth, when he seemed to bethink himself, glanced round furtively and put the unbroken biscuit and the fragments of the broken one carefully into his breast pocket, saying with a pitiable air of affected carelessness: "I've just remembered how fond my little boy is of this particular kind of biscuit, and he doesn't get many. We're not very well off." And he gulped down a mouthful of the port

I stopped short in my favorite disquisition on the continuity of the English climate, and said: "Look here, my good chap, what's happened? Has your father lost his money, or what?"

"He's dead—and he—he left all his money to a woman he married just before he died," he said jerkily.

"Tell me," I said, with a good deal of sympathy in my voice.

"We quarrelled about my marriage—three years ago. I married a poor girl, an orphan, and he wanted me to marry a rich one, or at any rate a girl of good family. But he made me an allowance, and we lived on it all right. Then he married a widow who lived near him, and neither I nor my wife could get on with her at all. We and she grew to hate one another, as he very well knew. Soon afterwards he died, poor old chap,