In his old head, so clear, so narrow and so keen, there ran in spite of reason the craft of dead centuries and tales of demons inhabiting human things. He had not eaten. He had been awakened too early from sleep. He had suffered agony and loss. It was the fault of the Green Overcoat! of the accursed thing before him! But that thing was worth twenty pounds.
For a moment he fingered (and felt sacrilegious as he did so) the right-hand pocket. He touched within it the cheque book. There arose in him almost simultaneously a vision of what one could do with the cheque book of a really wealthy man, a man with a large balance for his private whims, a man known to be generously careless; and as he had that vision there came with it another vision—the vision of the inside of a British prison, the nearest thing to Hell which God permits on earth.
It was the second vision that conquered. The old man drew his fingers from that cheque book as a man in cold weather draws his fingers reluctantly from the fire.
Then, with sudden haste, and muttering all the while those curious curses in a tongue which is not ours, he folded the thing together,
