Old fires and Profitable Ghosts. Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

inside. The wall of this annexe—which had no upper floor, and invited you to mistake it for a harmless studio—was merely a sheath, so to speak. Within, a corridor divided it from the true wall of the room: and this room had no window or top-light, though a handsome one in the roof—a dummy—beguiled the eyes of its neighbours.

      There was but one room: an apartment of really fine proportions, never used by the tenants of the house, and known but to a few curious ones among its frequenters.

      The story went that the late owner, Earl C——, had reason to believe himself persistently cheated at cards by his best friends, and in particular by a Duke of the Blood Royal, who could hardly be accused to his face. The Earl's sense of honour forbade him to accuse any meaner man while the big culprit went unrebuked. Therefore he continued to lose magnificently while he devised a new room for play: the room in which I now followed Gervase.

      I had stood in it once before and admired the courtly and costly thoroughness of the Earl's rebuke. I had imagined him conducting his expectant guests to the door, ushering them in with a wave of the hand, and taking his seat tranquilly amid the dead, embarrassed silence: had imagined him facing the ​Royal Duke and asking, "Shall we cut?" with a voice of the politest inflection.

      For the room was a sheet of mirrors. Mirrors panelled the walls, the doors, the very backs of the shutters. The tables had mirrors for tops: the whole ceiling was one vast mirror. From it depended three great candelabra of cut-glass, set with reflectors here, there, and everywhere.

      I had heard that even the floor was originally of polished brass. If so, later owners must have ripped up the plates and sold them: for now a few cheap Oriental rugs carpeted the unpolished boards. The place was abominabty dusty: the striped yellow curtains had lost half their rings and drooped askew from their soiled vallances. Across one of the wall-panels ran an ugly scar. A smell of rat pervaded the air. The present occupiers had no use for a room so obviously unsuitable to games of chance, as they understood chance: and I doubt if a servant entered it once a month. Gervase had ordered candles and a fire: but the chimney was out of practice, and the smoke wreathed itself slowly about us as we stood surrounded by the ghostly company of our reflected selves.

      "We shall not be disturbed," said Gervase. "I told the man I was expecting a friend, that our business was private, and that until he called I wished to be alone. I did not explain by what entrance I expected him. The people in the front ​cannot hear us. Have a cigar?" He pushed the open case towards me. Then, as I drew back, "You've no need to be scrupulous," he added, "seeing that they were bought with your money."

      "If that's so, I will," said I; and having chosen one, struck a match. Glancing round, I saw a hundred small flames spurt up, and a hundred men hold them to a hundred glowing cigar-tips.

      "After you with the match." Gervase took it from me with a steady hand. He, too, glanced about him while he puffed. "Ugh!" He blew a long cloud, and shivered within his furred overcoat. "What a gang!"

      "It takes all sorts to make a world," said I fatuously, for lack of anything better.

      "Don't be an infernal idiot!" he answered, flicking the dust off one of the gilt chairs, and afterwards cleaning a space for his elbow on the looking-glass table. "It takes only two sorts to make the world we've lived in, and that's you and I." He gazed slowly round the walls. "You and I, and a few fellows like us—not to mention the women, who don't count."

      "Well," said I, "as far as the world goes—if you must discuss it—I always found it a good enough place."

      "Because you started as an unconsidering fool: and because, afterwards, when we came to grips, you were the under-dog, and I gave you no time. My word—how I have hustled you!"

      ​I yawned. "All right: I can wait. Only if you suppose I came here to listen to your moral reflections——"

      He pulled the cigar from between his teeth and looked at me along it.

      "I know perfectly well why you came here," he said slowly, and paused. "Hadn't we better have it out—with the cards on the table?" He drew a small revolver from his pocket and laid it with a light clink on the table before him. I hesitated for a moment, then followed his example, and the silent men around us did the same.

      A smile curled his thin lips as he observed this multiplied gesture. "Yes," he said, as if to himself, "that is what it all comes to."

      "And now," said I, "since you know my purpose here, perhaps you will tell me yours."

      "That is just what I am trying to explain. Only you are so impatient, and it—well, it's a trifle complicated." He puffed for a moment in silence. "Roughly, it might be enough to say that I saw you standing outside my house a while ago; that I needed a talk with you alone, in some private place; that I guessed, if you saw me, you would follow with no more invitation; and that, so reasoning, I led you here, where no one is likely to interrupt us."

      "Well," I admitted, "all that seems plain sailing."

      "Quite so; but it's at this point the thing grows ​complicated." He rose, and walking to the fireplace, turned his back on me and spread his palms to the blaze. "Well," he asked, after a moment, gazing into the mirror before him, "why don't you shoot?"

      I thrust my hands into my trouser-pockets and leaned back staring—I daresay sulkily enough—at the two revolvers within grasp. "I've got my code," I muttered.

      "The code of—these mirrors. You won't do the thing because it's not the thing to do; because these fellows"—he waved a hand and the ghosts waved back at him—"don't do such things, and you haven't the nerve to sin off your own bat. Come"—he strolled back to his seat and leaned towards me across the table—"it's not much to boast of, but at this eleventh hour we must snatch what poor credit we can. You are, I suppose, a more decent fellow for not having fired: and I—— By the way, you did feel the temptation?"

      I nodded. "You may put your money on that. I never see you without wanting to kill you. What's more, I'm going to do it."

      "And I," he said, "knew the temptation and risked it. No: let's be honest about it. There was no risk: because, my good Sir, I know you to a hair."

      "There was," I growled.

      "Pardon me, there was none. I came here having a word to say to you, and these mirrors have taught me how to say it. Take a look at ​them—the world we are leaving—that's it: and a cursed second-hand, second-class one at that."

      He paced slowly round on it, slewing his body in the chair.

      "I say a second-class one," he resumed, "because, my dear Reggie, when all's said and done, we are second-class, the pair of us, and pretty bad second-class. I met you first at Harrow. Our fathers had money: they wished us to be gentlemen without well understanding what it meant: and with unlimited pocket-money and his wits about him any boy can make himself a power in a big school. That is what we did: towards the end we even set the fashion for a certain set; and a rank bad fashion it was. But, in truth, we had no business there: on every point of breeding we were outsiders. I suspect it was a glimmering consciousness of this that made us hate each other from the first. We understood one another too well. Oh, there's no mistake about it! Whatever we've missed in life, you and I have hated."

      He paused, eyeing me queerly. I kept my hands in my pockets. "Go on," I said.

      "From Harrow we went to College—the same business over again. We drifted, of course, into the same set; for already we had become necessary to each other. We set the pace of that set—were its apparent leaders. But in truth we were alone—you and I—as utterly alone as two shipwrecked men on a raft. The others were shadows to us: we followed ​their code because we had to be gentlemen, but we did not understand it in the least. For, after all, the roots of that code lay in the breeding and tradition of honour, with which we had no concern. To each other you and I were intelligible and real; but as concerned that code and the men who followed it by right of birth and nature, we were looking-glass men imitating—imitating—imitating."

      "We set the pace," said I. "You've allowed that."

      "To