"It was when I was at school," he said. "Are you making a collection or something?"
"Well, not exactly. I got them out of a fellow's desk."
"There must be money in architecture," said the Saint encouragingly.
"No, it wasn't at the office. This was a fellow who lived in the same boardinghouse with me when I was living in Bayswater. You see—"
The Saint studied him thoughtfully. His uninvited callers in the past had included more than one optimistic gentleman who had tried to sell him a machine for making diamonds or turning water into lubricating oil, and he was always glad to listen to a new story. But although the opening he had just listened to might well have served as a prelude to one of those flights of misdirected ingenuity which were the Saint's perennial joy and occasional source of income, there seemed to be something genuine about the young man in front of him which didn't quite fit in with the Saint's shrewdly discriminating suspicions.
"Why not start at the beginning and go on to the end?" he suggested.
"It's quite simple, really," explained Graham as if he didn't find it simple at all. "You see, about six months ago I lent this fellow a tenner."
"What fellow?"
"His name's David Ingleston. I knew him quite slightly, the way you know people in a boardinghouse, but he seemed all right, and he said he'd pay me back in a week. He hasn't paid me back yet. He kept promising to pay me back, but when the time came he'd always have some excuse or other. When I moved my digs to Bloomsbury it got worse — if I rang up or went to see him he'd be out or he'd have been sent abroad by his firm or something, and if I wrote to him he didn't answer, and so on. I'm not very well off, as I told you, and a tenner means quite a bit to me. I was getting pretty fed up with it."
The young man stared resentfully at the sheaf of bonds on the table, as if they personified the iniquity of their owner.