"Feel free to sell this," said Sir Ramsey.

"Sir, I will not sell it," said the driver. "I have worked twenty-two years for a gentleman—a real gentleman. No one can take that away from me. Not all the Greek money in the world. This is no more for sale than the twenty-two good years of my life, sir."

A thousand years of breeding in the cold British clime enabled Sir Ramsey not to cry. Death would be an easy thing after this.

"Thank you," said Sir Ramsey. "They were twenty-two good years."

"Will you be needing the car tonight, sir?"

"No. I don't think so. Thank you very much."

"Good afternoon then, sir. And good-bye."

"Good-bye," said Sir Ramsey, realizing that life was always harder than death.

The furniture was covered for storage as it had been for the last year. He went to the room where he was born and then to the room where he was raised and, finally, in the grand banquet hall with its majestic fireplaces that he could not now even afford to fill with wood, he strolled the gallery of family portraits.

And in the sense that comes to dying people, he understood. He understood that the baronetcy had not begun in grandeur but probably very much like that wretch Skouratis—with lying, robbing, stealing, deceiving. That was how fortunes began, and to preside over the ending of one was perhaps more moral than to preside over its beginning. Sir Ramsey would oversee the end of the Frawl fortune with grace. That was the least he could do.

The low purr of a Jaguar engine came into the quiet peace of the great banquet hall of Attington.

It was Skouratis. Sir Ramsey could tell by his desperate pudgy run. Skouratis jiggled several locks until he found an open door and, finally, sucking great inadequate lungfuls of air and wiping his forehead of greasy sweat, he stumbled into the great banquet hall of Attington that he now owned.