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260 ?" Captain Yule's attention, however, dropped before the answer came, and he turned off the subject with an "Ah, if you come to that, neither am I! But it doesn't signify," he went on. "What are you?" he more sociably demanded.

Chivers clearly had to think a bit. "Well, sir, I'm not quite that. Whatever has there been to make me, sir?" he asked in dim extenuation.

"How in the world do I know? I mean to whom do you belong?"

Chivers seemed to scan impartially the whole field. "If you could just only tell me, sir! I quite seem to waste away—for someone to take an order of."

Clement Yule, by this time, had become aware he was amusing. "Who pays your wages?"

"No one at all, sir," said the old man very simply.

His friend, fumbling an instant in a waistcoat pocket, produced something that his hand, in obedience to a little peremptory gesture and by a trick of which he had unlearned, through scant custom, the neatness, though the propriety was instinctive, placed itself in a shy practical relation to. "Then there's a sovereign. And I haven't