respectable banker.

In a word, it was generally agreed that Mahmoud's-Nephew's success had
been bound up with his splendid silence, his fall, bankruptcy, and
death, with a lesion of the brain which had disturbed this miracle of
self-control.




The Inventor


I had a day free between two lectures in the south-west of England, and
I spent it stopping at a town in which there was a large and very
comfortable old posting-house or coaching-inn. I had meant to stay some
few hours there and to take the last train out in the evening, and I had
meant to spend those hours alone and resting; but this was not permitted
me, for just as I had taken up the local paper, which was a humble,
reasonable thing, empty of any passion and violence and very reposeful
to read, a man came up and touched my left elbow sharply: a gesture not
at all to my taste nor, I think, to that of anyone who is trying to read
his paper.

I looked up and saw a man who must have been quite sixty years of age.
He had on a soft, felt slouch hat, a very old and greenish black coat;
he stooped and shuffled; he was clean-shaven, with long grey hair, and
his eyes were astonishingly bright and piercing and set close together.

He said, "I beg your pardon."