"
"You always disagree with me," answered Keith. "And you always find
yourself in the wrong. You remember how I warned you about that little
affair of yours? You remember what an ass you made of yourself?"
"What little affair?" enquired Eames, with a tinge of resignation in
his voice.
The other did not reply. Mr. Keith could be tactful, on occasions. He
pretended to be absorbed in cutting a cigar.
"What little affair?" insisted the bibliographer, fearful of what was
coming next.
It came.
"Oh, that balloon business. . . ."
It was not true to say of Mr. Eames that he lived on Nepenthe because
he was wanted by the London police for something that happened in
Richmond Park, that his real name was not Eames at all but Daniels--the
notorious Hodgson Daniels, you know, who was mixed up in the Lotus Club
scandal, that he was the local representative of an international gang
of white-slave traffickers who had affiliated offices in every part of
the world, that he was not a man at all but an old boarding-house
keeper who had very good reasons for assuming the male disguise, that
he was a morphinomaniac, a disfrocked Baptist minister, a pawnbroker
out of work, a fire-worshipper, a Transylvanian, a bank clerk who had
had a fall, a decayed jockey who disgraced himself at a subsequent
period in connection with some East-End mission for reforming the boys
of Bermondsey and then, after pawning his mother's jewelry, writing
anonymous threatening letters to society ladies about their husbands
and vice-versa, trying to blackmail three Cabinet Ministers and
tricking poor servant-girls out of their hard-earned wages by the sale
of sham Bibles, was luckily run to earth in Piccadilly Circus, after an
exciting chase, with a forty-pound salmon under his arm which he had
been seen to lift from the window of a Bond Street fishmonger.
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