After Rollison had gone, Jolly shook his head and smiled —a rather solemn smile, as one might give when brooding over the follies of youth or the idiosyncracies of men in love. He knew that Rollison had lately been lured into a series of social functions which he seldom enjoyed, and this was his first early night for a week. Moreover, Rollison—sometimes called the Toff—did not make up in the morning for sleep he lost at night He was busy with a variety of jobs, many self-imposed, and missed the services of Snub Higginbottom, his secretary.

The unexpected visit had driven sleep away. Jolly got up, put on a dark blue dressing-gown, made himself a cup of tea, and took it into the study. He enjoyed an hour there when Rollison was not in. To-night, he found himself contemplating the trophy wall.

At one time he had disapproved of it, for the trophies were not of ordinary hunts, but of man-hunts. And in most of them Jolly had played a part, not always willing, but often important There were, for instance, the two umbrella-handles. With one, Jolly had hooked the feet from under a man who might easily have mortally wounded his employer; with the other, Jolly had knocked a man out simply by striking him over the head. Curiously enough, these incidents were the only ones for which Jolly had been formally thanked by a magistrate or a judge for contributing to the success of the law over lawlessness, which was why Rollison had selected them as Jolly’s trophies.

There was the top hat, right at the top, with a hole drilled through the crown. There were chicken feathers. There were knives, automatics, curious and ingenious weapons, some of which hardly looked lethal. There were glass cases in which were tiny quantities of deadly poisons. There was a cosh, one of the earliest trophies; it was after Rollison had won the cosh, that Jolly had first heard him called “The Toff”. And there was a visiting-card—one of Rollison’s, with spots of dried blood on one side and, on the other, a simple drawing of a top-hat, a monocle and a swagger cane. The Toff seldom used such a card these days