“Can’t complain,” Zertho said, leaning back with a self-complacent air. “Patrician life suits me after being so many years an outsider.”
“No doubt it is pleasant,” his companion answered with a meaning look, “if one can completely bury the past.”
“I have buried it,” Zertho answered quickly.
Max Richards, the inventor of “The Agony of Monte Carlo,” regarded the man before him with a supercilious smile. “And you pay me to prevent its exhumation—eh?”
“I thought we had agreed not to mention the matter again,” Zertho exclaimed, darting at his crafty-looking fellow-adventurer a look of annoyance and suspicion.
“My dear fellow,” answered the other quite calmly, “I have no desire to refer to it. If you are completely without regret, and your mind is perfectly at ease, well, I’m only too happy to hear it. I have sincere admiration, I assure you, for a man who can forget at will. I wish I could.”
“I do not forget,” Zertho snapped. “Your confounded demands will never allow me to forget.”
The thin-faced man smiled, lazily watching the smoke ascend from an unusually good weed.
“It is merely payment for services rendered,” he observed. “I’m not the lucky heir to an estate, therefore I can’t afford to give people assistance gratis.”
“No,” cried Zertho in a tumult of anger at the remembrance of recent occurrences. “No, you’re an infernal blackmailer!”