"A keepsake that was given me. It's a charm, a ju-ju that will bring fortune to somebody, and I was going to give it to you. But on your own recommendation I shall keep it for myself."

"You are quite right. It will be safer for us to go our own several ways from here."

CHAPTER XIII
AT THE LIVERPOOL END

Now, Godfrey O'Neill, deceased, was a man who at various times in his life had extracted from West Africa very considerable sums of money. He was shrewd, he was popular, he had the knack of resisting sickly climates, and he knew the possibilities of the Oil Rivers seaboard down to the last bag of kernels.

According to his own account he had started life as a ship's purser. People who were more fond of accuracy mentioned that as a matter of history he had first gone as cabin-boy in a palm oil brig. But be that as it may, he had been associated with the Coast from his earliest days, and at the age of five-and-twenty was trading there on his own account.

At first he stuck to an old trading hulk with moorings in the muddy Monk River and battled with its swarms of cockroaches and got together a business; but by degrees he gained the confidence of the native riparian magnates, and by the time he was thirty he had built on piles a fine set of factory buildings on the bank, had bought a treaty with the then King of Okky, and had built another factory at Malla-Nulla in spite of the fact that the beach there was one of the most surf-smitten on the Coast. After that he felt that his Liverpool correspondents were getting more than their due share of his hard-wrung profits, and so he put the Coast factories under managers and came back to the Mersey. And thereafter, with occasional visits to the Coast and the Islands, he made Liverpool his headquarters.

He had an office in Water Street, a warehouse near Huskisson Dock, and a house furnished with mid-Victorian solidity and ugliness out at Princes' Park. A sister, Mrs. Craven, whose unsatisfactory husband had conveniently died on the Coast, kept house for him, and as she voted marriage a failure, Godfrey professed himself as quite ready to take her verdict and was not anxious to dabble in dangerous experiments.

Finally, as Godfrey O'Neill discovered, after a two years' trial of the style of living that suited him at Princes' Park, that it cost him just £900 a year, he saw very little use in bestirring himself to earn more. He quite admitted that there were other luxuries in the world that he did not indulge in. He might have kept horses, for instance; but he happened to dislike them. He might have had a French chef; only plain roast beef and plain roast mutton appealed more to his appetite, and a plain British cook at £20 a year produced these exactly to his taste. He might have had a larger house, but frankly he did not want one.

So he went down to the office in Water Street every other day, and ceased to stir the business there when it showed any signs of averaging a more than £1,500 profit for any one year, not because he objected to additional wealth, but because he far preferred to play whist to pursuing money. One may here own freely that Godfrey O'Neill was an active member of no less than five whist quartettes which met at clubs and houses, and there was the amusement which after long search he had discovered pleased him best.