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made it plain now why I began with a question which you had every right to resent?”
    “Perfectly plain, my lord, and your candor does you credit.”
    I was very much taken with the unassuming manners of the young man, and his evident desire to accept no service under false pretenses. When I had finished my sentence the pauper nobleman rose to his feet and bowed.
    “I am very much your debtor, monsieur, for your courtesy in receiving me, and can only beg pardon for occupying your time on a futile quest. I wish you good morning, monsieur.”
    “One moment, my lord,” I rejoined, waving him to his chair again. “Although I am unprepared to accept a commission on the terms you suggest, I may, nevertheless, be able to offer a hint or two that will prove of service to you. I think I remember the announcement of Lord Chizelrigg’s death. He was somewhat eccentric, was he not?”
    “Eccentric?” said the young man, with a slight laugh, seating himself again. “Well, rather !”
    “I vaguely remember that he was accredited with the possession of something like twenty thousand acres of land?”
    “Twenty-seven thousand, as a matter of fact,” replied my visitor.
    “Have you fallen heir to the lands as well as to the title?”
    “Oh, yes; the estate was entailed. The old gentleman could not divert it from me if he would, and I rather suspect that fact must have been the cause of some worry to him.”
    “But surely, my lord, a man who owns, as one might say, a principality in this wealthy realm of England, cannot be penniless?”
    Again the young man laughed.
    “Well, no,” he replied, thrusting his hand in his pocket and bringing to light a few brown coppers and a white silver piece. “I possess enough money to buy some food to-night, but not enough to dine at the Hotel Cecil. You see, it is like this. I belong to a somewhat ancient family, various members of whom went the pace, and mortgaged their acres up to the hilt. I could not raise a further penny on my estates were I to try my hardest, because at the time the money was lent, land was much more valuable than it is to-day. Agricultural depression and all that sort of thing, have, if I may put it so, left me a good many thousands worse off than if I had no land at all. Besides this, during my late uncle’s life, Parliament, on his behalf, intervened once or twice, allowing him in the first place to cut valuable timber, and in the second place to sell the pictures of Chizelrigg Chase at Christie’s for figures which make one’s mouth water.”
    “And what became of the money?” I asked; whereupon once more this genial nobleman laughed.
    “That is exactly what I came up in the lift to learn if Monsieur Valmont could discover.”
    “My lord, you interest me,” I said, quite truly, with an uneasy apprehension that I should take up his case after all, for I liked the young man already. His lack of pretense appealed to me, and that sympathy which is so universal among my countrymen enveloped him, as I may say, quite independent of my own will.
    “My uncle,” went on Lord Chizelrigg, “was somewhat of an anomaly in our family. He must have been a reversal to a very, very ancient type; a type of which we have no record. He was as miserly as his forefathers were prodigal. When he came into the title and estate some twenty years ago, he dismissed the whole retinue of servants, and, indeed, was defendant in several cases at law where retainers of our family brought suit against him for wrongful dismissal, or dismissal without a penny compensation in lieu of notice. I am pleased to say he lost all his cases, and when he pleaded poverty, got permission to sell a certain number of heirlooms, enabling him to make compensation, and giving him something on which to live.
    These heirlooms at auction sold so unexpectedly well, that my uncle acquired a taste, as it were, of what might be done. He could always prove that the rents went to the mortgagees, and that he had