JIMMY GETS NEWS

There was a letter from the "Great Horatio" on Jimmy's plate the
following morning. Jimmy looked at the handwriting and the foreign
stamp and grimaced.

The Great Horatio seldom wrote unless something were the matter. He
was a good many years older than Jimmy, and Jimmy held him in distinct
awe.

He finished his breakfast before he even thought of breaking the seal,
then he took up the letter and carried it over with him to the fire.

Jimmy Challoner was breakfasting in his dressing-gown. It was very
seldom that he managed to get entirely dressed by the time breakfast
was ready. He sat down now in a big chair and stuck his slippered feet
out to the warmth.

He turned his brother's letter over and over distastefully. What the
deuce did the old chap want now? he wondered. He gave a sigh of
resignation, and broke open the flap.

He and the Great Horatio had not met for two years.

Horatio Ferdinand Challoner, to give him his full name, was a man whose
health, or, rather, ill-health, was his hobby.

All his life he had firmly believed himself to be in a dying state; all
his life he had lived more or less at Spas, or on the Riviera, or at