The manager laughed.
"You certainly are the coolest young gentleman I ever met. However, Mr. Anson, it may please you to know that your bank gave you the best of recommendations. I will say so to anybody."
So Philip first drafted and then copied the following letter:
"Dear Sirs: M. Foret, of this hotel, has given me your names as a firm likely to transact certain negotiations for me. I want to purchase a small property in the Mile End Road, known as Johnson's Mews; also a shop near the entrance to the mews, tenanted by a marine-store dealer named O'Brien. The mews is owned by the Cardiff and Havre Coal Company, Ltd. I do not know who owns the shop. I wish to acquire these properties for a philanthropic purpose, but I am most desirous that my name should not figure in the transaction. I propose, therefore, when you have ascertained the price, which should be at the earliest possible moment, to pay to your credit the requisite amount. You can have the properties transferred to any nominee you choose, and again transferred to me. Kindly add your costs, etc., to the purchase price. My movements are somewhat uncertain, so please send all communications by letter. It will be an obligation, and lead to future business, if you attend to this matter to-morrow morning. Yours faithfully,
"Philip Anson."
He did not compose this letter without considerable trouble. The "philanthropic purpose" he had already decided upon, but he thought it was rather clever to refer to the possibilities of "future business."
As for the double transfer, he distinctly remembered copying letters dealing with several such transactions at the time of the coal company's conversion into a limited liability concern.
He was early to bed, and his rest was not disturbed by dreams. He rose long before the ordinary residents. Deferring his breakfast, he walked to Fleet Street and purchased copies of morning and evening papers for the whole of the week.
He could thus enjoy the rare luxury of seeing himself as others saw him. He read the perfervid descriptions of the scene in court, and found himself variously described as "pert," "masterful," "imperious," "highly intelligent," "endowed with a thin veneer of education," and "affected."
Philip could afford to laugh at the unfavorable epithets. Up to the age of thirteen, he had been trained in a first-rate lycée, and his work was supervised by his mother, a woman of very great culture. He spoke French as well as English, and spoke both admirably. He knew some Greek and Latin, was well advanced in arithmetic, and had a special penchant for history and geography.
It was in the glowing articles which appeared during his imprisonment that he took the keenest interest. Oddly enough, one ingenious correspondent blundered onto a clew. Gifted with an analytical mind, he had reasoned that the diamond-laden meteor fell during the extraordinary storm of the nineteenth, and the Meteorological Department in Victoria Street helped him by describing the center of the disturbance as situated somewhat to the east of the London Hospital.