"Thank God, no!" said Bobby. "Waiting for him to turn up dead, bruised, battered, or simply intoxicated and stripped of his money. He gave me the slip in Piccadilly with two hundred-pound notes in his pocket. The next place I find him was half an hour ago in a young lady's bed, dead to the world, smiling, and with nearly a thousand pounds in bank-notes he'd hived somehow during the day."
"A thousand pounds!"
"Yes, and he'd only started with two hundred."
"I say," said Tozer, forgetting his cards, "what a chap he must have been when he was young!"
"When he was young! Lord, I don't want to see him any younger than he is; if this is youth, give me old age."
"You'll get it fast enough," said Tozer, "don't you worry; and this will be a reminder to you to keep old. There's an Arab proverb that says, 'There are two things colder than ice, an old young man and a young old man.'"
"Colder than ice!" said Bobby. "I wish you had five minutes with Uncle Simon."
"But who was this lady—this young——"
"Two of the nicest people on earth," said Bobby, "an old lady and her daughter—French. He saved the girl in an omnibus accident or something in one of his escapades, and took her home to her mother. Then to-night he must have remembered them, and got a friend to take him there. Fancy, the cheek! What made him, in his state, able to remember them?"
"What is the young lady like?"