multiply every farthing that had ever come his way. Everything he touched seemed to turn into gold. To-day he was a millionaire in pounds sterling, with a palace in the Mayfair, a steam yacht in the Solent, a game preserve in Scotland, a trout stream in Norway, a shiny, white, flower-bordered villa on the Riviera, a moor in Yorkshire, a flat in Paris, and with financial interests that reached from Chicago to Algiers, from Kamchatka to Timbuktu, from Spitzbergen to the Falklands. “Land Development” was the slogan on his letter head; and there was a chance that, at the next list of royal birthday honors, if the Conservatives to whose party fund he was a generous contributor continued in power, he would become Sir Preserved Higgins, Baronet.
Short he was, pudgy, bald-headed, with a full, curly, russet beard that was always spotted with crumbs, thick lips, steel-gray eyes, and a large-pored, Hebraic nose. He still dropped his h’ches; made rather a point of it—perhaps from a sense of inverted snobbery.
He was shuffling the cards with agile fingers, dealt, looked at his hand, and slapped the man at his left on the shoulder with crude familiarity.
“Come on in, cockie,” he said, “the water's fine. Ten—and ten—and a pony, wot?” registering his bet with chips and markers.
The one addressed as “cockie,” whose real name was The Honorable Hector Wade, second son of the Earl of Dealle, winked meaningly at the third man, his older brother. The Honorable Tollemache Wade who, like himself and like their father, was dark and
