“That’s all right,” Montague assented. “It was dead easy. You see, they were mostly the Marquis’s friends, toffs, without any head for business, and we swore them to absolute secrecy—told them if they breathed a word of it, the whole thing would be spoilt.”
“But you aren’t giving fifty thousand pounds for the Shoreditch Empress?”
The financier laughed scornfully.
“Not likely! That’s where the Marquis and I make a bit. We have another agreement with Peter, who’s a pal and a white man, to buy the place for fifteen thousand. Then we’ve an arrangement—”
“You needn’t go on,” Jacob interrupted. “I can quite see that there are plenty of ways of working the swindle.”
“Swindle?” his host repeated, with a pained expression. “My dear Mr. Pratt!”
“Why, what else can you call it?” Jacob protested.
The Marquis coughed.
“It is only lately,” he said, “that, with the assistance of Mr. Dane Montague, I have endeavoured to supplement my income in this fashion. I do not understand the harshness of your term, Mr. Pratt, as applied to this transaction. I have little experience of city life, but I have always understood that money was made there, in financial and Stock Exchange circles, by buying from a man something which you knew was worth more money, selling it to another and—er—pocketing the difference. Surely this involves a certain amount of what a purist would call deceit?”