In 1908, Roger first heard the magic word “reconstruction,” and to his surprise found himself in possession of twenty thousand pounds and a Directorship of the new Bango-Bango Mining Company.

In 1909 a piece of real gold was identified, and the shares went up like a rocket.

In 1910 the Stock Exchange suddenly woke to the fact that rubber tyres were made of rubber, and in a moment the Great Boom was sprung upon an amazed City.  The Bango-Bango Development Company was immediately formed to take over the Bango-Bango Mining Company (together with its prospector, if alive, its plant, shafts and other property, not forgetting the piece of gold) and more particularly to develop the vegetable resources of the district with the view of planting rubber trees in the immediate future.  A neatly compiled prospectus put matters very clearly before the stay-at-home Englishman.  It explained quite concisely that, supposing the trees were planted so many feet apart throughout the whole property of five thousand square miles, and allowing a certain period for the growth of a tree to maturity, and putting the average yield of rubber per tree at, in round figures, so much, and assuming for the sake of convenience that rubber would remain at its present price, and estimating the cost of working the plantation at say, roughly, 100,000 pounds, why, then it was obvious that the profits would be anything you liked up to two billion a year—­while (this was important) more land could doubtless be acquired if the share-holders thought fit.  And even if you were certain that a rubber-tree couldn’t possibly grow in the Bango-Bango district (as in confidence it couldn’t), still it was worth taking shares purely as an investment, seeing how rapidly rubber was going up; not to mention the fact that Roger St Verax, the well-known financier, was a Director ... and so on.

In short the Bango-Bango Development Company was, in the language of the City, a safe thing.

Let me hasten to the end of this story.  At the end of 1910 Roger was a millionaire; and for quite a week afterwards he used to wonder where all the money had come from.  In the old days, when he won a cool thousand by betting, he knew that somebody else had lost a cool thousand by betting, but it did not seem to be so in this case.  He had met hundreds of men who had made fortunes through rubber; he had met hundreds who bitterly regretted that they had missed making a fortune; but he had never met any one who had lost a fortune.  This made him think the City an even more wonderful place than before.

But before he could be happy there remained one thing for him to do; he must find somebody to share his happiness.  He called on his old friend, Mary Brown, one Sunday.

“Mary,” he said, with the brisk confidence of the City man, “I find I’m disengaged next Tuesday.  Will you meet me at St George’s Church at two?  I should like to show you the curate and the vestry, and one or two things like that.”