The Duke, I imagine, is under the necessity of mortgaging his estates; indeed, I should suppose he is here in America to raise money.”

Mr. Fyshe was a man of lightning action. Any man accustomed to the Stock Exchange learns to think quickly.

“One moment!” he cried; “I see we are right at your door. May I just run in and use your telephone? I want to call up Boulder for a moment.”

Two minutes later Mr. Fyshe was saying into the telephone, “Oh, is that you, Boulder? I was looking for you in vain to-day – wanted you to meet the Duke of Dulham, who came in quite unexpectedly from New York; felt sure you’d like to meet him. Wanted you at the club for dinner, and now it turns out that the club’s all upset – waiters’ strike or some such rascality – and the Palaver, so I hear, is in the same fix. Could you possibly –”

Here Mr. Fyshe paused, listening a moment and then went on, “Yes, yes; an excellent idea – most kind of you. Pray do send your motor to the hotel and give the Duke a bite of dinner. No, I won’t join you, thanks. Most kind. Good-night –”

And within a few minutes more the motor of Mr. Boulder was rolling down from Plutoria Avenue to the Grand Palaver Hotel.

What passed between Mr. Boulder and the Duke that evening is not known. That they must have proved congenial company to one another there is no doubt. In fact, it would seem that, dissimilar as they were in many ways, they found a common bond of interest in sport. And it is quite likely that Mr. Boulder may have mentioned that he had a hunting-lodge – what the Duke would call a shooting-box – in Wisconsin woods, and that it was made of logs, rough cedar logs not squared, and that the timber wolves and others which surrounded it were of a ferocity without parallel.

Those who know the Duke best could measure the effect of that upon his temperament.

At any rate, it is certain that Mr. Lucullus Fyshe at his breakfast-table next morning chuckled with suppressed joy to read in the Plutopian Citizen the item:

“We learn that the Duke of Dulham, who has been paying a brief visit to the City, leaves this morning with Mr. Asmodeus Boulder for the Wisconsin woods. We understand that Mr. Boulder intends to show his guest, who is an ardent sportsman, something of the American wolf.”

And so the Duke went whirling westwards and northwards with Mr. Boulder in the drawing-room end of a Pullman car, that was all littered up with double-barrelled express rifles and leather game bags, and lynx catchers and wolf traps and Heaven knows what. And the Duke had on his very roughest sporting suit, made, apparently, of alligator hide; and as he sat there with a rifle across his knees, while the train swept onward through open fields and broken woods, the real country at last, towards the Wisconsin forest, there was such a light of genial happiness in his face that had not been seen there since he had been marooned in the mud jungles of Upper Burmah.

And opposite, Mr. Boulder looked at him with fixed, silent eyes, and murmured from time to time some renewed information of the ferocity of the timber wolf.

But of wolves other than the timber wolf, and fiercer still, into whose hands the Duke might fall in America, he spoke never a word.

Nor is it known in the record what happened in Wisconsin, and to the Mausoleum Club the Duke and his visit remained only as a passing and a pleasant memory.

THE WIZARD OF FINANCE

Down in the City itself, just below the residential street where the Mausoleum Club is situated, there stands overlooking Central Square the Grand Palaver Hotel. It is, in truth, at no great distance from the club, not half a minute in one’s motor. In fact, one could almost walk it.

But in Central Square the quiet of Plutoria Avenue is exchanged for another atmosphere. There are fountains that splash unendingly and mingle their music with the sound of the motorhorns and the clatter of the cabs. There are real trees and little green benches, with people reading yesterday’s newspaper, and grass cut into plots among the asphalt. There is at one end a statue of the first governor of the state, life-size, cut in stone; and at the other a statue of the last, ever so much larger than life, cast in bronze.