“Well,” said Edward Henry, “you’re a great man!”

“No, I’m not,” said Mr. Seven Sachs.  “But my income is four hundred thousand dollars a year, and rising.  I’m out after the stuff, that’s all.”

“I say you are a great man!” Edward Henry repeated.  Mr. Sachs’s recital had inspired him.  He kept saying to himself:  “And I’m a great man, too.  And I’ll show ’em.”

Mr. Sachs, having delivered himself of his load, had now lapsed comfortably back into his original silence, and was prepared to listen.  But Edward Henry, somehow, had lost the desire to enlarge on his own variegated past.  He was absorbed in the greater future.

At length he said very distinctly: 

“You honestly think I could run a theatre?”

“You were born to run a theatre,” said Seven Sachs.

Thrilled, Edward Henry responded: 

“Then I’ll write to those lawyer people, Slossons, and tell ’em I’ll be around with the brass about eleven to-morrow.”

Mr. Sachs rose.  A clock had delicately chimed two.

“If ever you come to New York, and I can do anything for you—­” said Mr. Sachs, heartily.

“Thanks,” said Edward Henry.  They were shaking hands.  “I say,” Edward Henry went on.  “There’s one thing I want to ask you.  Why did you promise to back Rose Euclid and her friends?  You must surely have known—­” He threw up his hands.

Mr. Sachs answered: 

“I’ll be frank with you.  It was her cousin that persuaded me into it—­Elsie April.”

“Elsie April?  Who’s she?”

“Oh!  You must have seen them about together—­her and Rose Euclid!  They’re nearly always together.”

“I saw her in the restaurant here to-day with a rather jolly girl—­blue hat.”

“That’s the one.  As soon as you’ve made her acquaintance you’ll understand what I mean,” said Mr. Seven Sachs.

“Ah!  But I’m not a bachelor like you,” Edward Henry smiled archly.

“Well, you’ll see when you meet her,” said Mr. Sachs.  Upon which enigmatic warning he departed, and was lost in the immense glittering nocturnal silence of Wilkins’s.

Edward Henry sat down to write to Slossons by the 3 A.M. post.  But as he wrote he kept saying to himself:  “So Elsie April’s her name, is it?  And she actually persuaded Sachs—­Sachs—­to make a fool of himself!”

CHAPTER VI

LORD WOLDO AND LADY WOLDO

I

The next morning, Joseph, having opened wide the window, informed his master that the weather was bright and sunny, and Edward Henry arose with just that pleasant degree of fatigue which persuades one that one is if anything rather more highly vitalized than usual.  He sent for Mr. Bryany, as for a domestic animal, and Mr. Bryany, ceremoniously attired, was received by a sort of jolly king who happened to be trimming