Outside their own country two British types carry their caste marks patently. They are the tourist and the officer. Gibraltar abounds with both, the company of the first having an occasional and transient superiority when it is swollen by Transatlantic arrivals or intermittent yachting cruisers. But the officers of the garrison and their wives and daughters are the reigning members of the informal club which makes Society on the Rock. They know each other, they discuss each other; the longer they stay the more parochial grow their interests. Newcomers undergo a period of silent probation. They cannot slip in unobserved. The who and the whence test is applied to each with unction, sometimes without justice, but almost invariably with good-humor. As a consequence everybody, within limits, knows something about everybody else.

There are exceptions, and one, an olive-complexioned, gray-clad, gray-haired, dark-eyed man, was walking steadily down the Waterport one sunny afternoon as a rush of cabs towards the custom-house proclaimed the incoming of an important steamer. Mr. William Miller had a pleasantly situated cottage in the South Town. The postman knew that he had many correspondents in Spain, England, Germany, and elsewhere. Moorish visitors from across the straits were not infrequent at a small office which he retained in Waterport Street. Men of letters, desiring information on recondite subjects, separated themselves from the frivolous landing parties of Messrs. Cook and called at the same address. No one had ever tapped the sources of Mr. Miller's encyclopÆdic knowledge in vain. No one had found him otherwise than affable. And though it was understood that his activities were literary, no resident or tourist had successfully probed the nature of his life-work.

The wives of many colonels had recognized this and had flung themselves with ardor against the breastworks of his imperturbability. Not one of them could look back with pride on any action in which they had won even a temporary advantage. Mr. Miller spoke freely, showed an intimate knowledge of men and manners throughout the civilized world, and appeared to manifest pleasure in sociabilities. His only attempts to return these lay in small but eclectic tea-parties whereat he displayed hoards of artistic treasures and discoursed learnedly of carpet dye and porcelain marks.

But he was by no means a ladies' man. He accepted, and was welcome at the hospitalities of many a mess or gun room. He sang well and could play a more than ordinary effective accompaniment to a comic song after hearing the air whistled half a dozen times by its would-be interpreter. The impersonality of his social attitude prevented his being popular, but he was an institution. As he walked along he bowed, nodded, smiled; obviously he knew everybody. Obviously everybody knew him.

As he walked across the sunlit square and dived into the deeply shadowed tunnel which is the Waterport, a tender fussed noisily up to the quay. Mr. Miller eyed the passengers on its deck keenly.

The steamer was evidently a White Star in from New York. The load of colossal trunks upon the deck would have told him that apart from the accent of the passengers and the flag at the masthead. Baggage agents began to dart here and there; Mr. Cook's uniformed interpreters were in the forefront of the fray; Spanish cab runners yelled and grimaced.

Mr. Miller stood aside without attempting to force a way into the tumult. His hands rested quietly together on the hilt of his cane. His brow was contemplative and unruffled. Certainly if he awaited anything he was in no hurry to find it.

All things come to those who wait, and Mr. Miller had not to wait long. A man strode suddenly out of the custom-house gate, thrust aside the Spanish porter who was snatching at his handbag, and made a beckoning motion towards a cab.

Mr. Miller strode quietly forward and reached it simultaneously with the fare.

The man looked at him with a sudden irritable alertness and then broke into a grin.

"You're here," he said, and flung his bag upon the seat. The other responded with a tiny shrug as if he deprecated the platitudinous nature of the remark. He motioned the man to take his seat, sat down beside him, and told the driver the name of an hotel. "Your man is looking after your heavy luggage?" he questioned.

The other nodded impatiently.

"Yes," he said. "Not that there's much to look after." He turned and glanced into his companion's face. "I'm getting down to bed-rock now; nothing left to waste on trivialities. I nearly came second class."

Miller's eyebrows rose.

"That would have been unnecessary." He speculated.

"Imbecile, as it turned out," agreed the man. "There were some bridge-playing Southerners on board, old school, couldn't bring themselves to be civil to the New Yorkers, but ready to take an Englishman, and a lord, moreover, to their hearts. No high play, but I'm eight hundred dollars up on the voyage."

Miller nodded placidly.

"Bed-rock is quite a way down yet," he smiled.

"Not if expenses are to mount as you advised me in your last letter," snapped the other. "Has anything been done?"

Miller shook his head slowly.

"Force is beyond us," he said, "for we don't possess it. Bribery is out of the question; there is no one left by the other side who has not had his price. Opportunity may be ours. We must await it."

"And waiting costs twenty pounds a week!"

The gray man turned his opened palm outwards with a deprecative motion which was not English at all.

"My dear Lord Landon, how can Opportunity be seized if there is no one to meet her when she appears?"

Landon gave a dissatisfied grunt.

"How many lacqueys have you set to wait on her?"

"Six," said Miller, succinctly. "Six men of action, who would have succeeded before now, but for an accident."

Landon's face took on the eager expression of a wolf to whom a distant taint is brought by the evening wind.

"Eh?" he cried. "There has been a chance, then; their defences are not impregnable?"

Miller shook his head.

"They have been strengthened since," he said diffidently. "But the weak spot in them is the child himself. He has never had, if you will pardon the remark, proper control. He is frankly disobedient of the precautions with which they surround him."

Landon grinned.

"There's my blood in him," he chuckled. "And, by God, I'm fond of the little toad, too. It's not only to spite her, Miller, or for the money that's in it. I never took the trouble to whop him; I believe he'd come to me of his own accord, if he had the chance."

"It's a large if," suggested Mr. Miller, politely.

Landon made no retort. His face had assumed a meditative mask; his lips were firmly pressed together; he had the effect of one who calculates pro against con.

"That's why I think it's time I took a hand," he said suddenly. "We'll knock off three of your six, Miller. I am prepared to be a host in myself."

For the moment the other said nothing. They had swung out of the Waterport Street and turned the sharp corner which brought them to the entrance of the hotel. He listened quietly as his companion demanded the number of the room engaged for him, received his letters, and entered the lift. He accompanied him silently. It was not till they were left alone that he pulled a pocket-book out, tranquilly turned the leaves, and consulted an entry.

"I note that I have had no remittance from you, Lord Landon," he announced, "since November."

"Six weeks ago," agreed Landon, languidly. "Six times twenty is a hundred and twenty. You reinforce my argument, my good Miller. A hundred and twenty pounds gone and you show me—nothing."

The other coughed a dry, perfunctory little cough.

"As far as I am concerned, the money is, as you say, gone," he allowed, "but you have just come by one hundred and sixty sovereigns owing to the complacence of these Southern gentlemen on board your boat. That puts us right and safeguards another fortnight."

Landon nodded and answered in a voice as dry as his own.

"That is a matter for discussion," he intimated. "I should like to hear these expenses justified to some appreciable extent. What was the chance which failed?"

"Though it failed," rejoined Miller, "it proved the advantage of constant vigilance. The child separated himself from his guardians in the very midst of the late afternoon traffic and got into the hands of one of our men. They reached the pier together; they were within an ace of success. Then Fate interfered—it must have been Fate," he interpolated with the ghost of a grin—"because her instrument was of your own house."

Landon came to a sudden halt in the opening of an envelope.

"What's that?" he cried quickly. "A relation of mine?"

"Captain John Aylmer, R.A., Assistant Secretary to the new Military Works Commission," answered Miller, sedately.

Landon swore. Then suddenly he began to laugh.

"It's quaint," he conceded. "It's damned quaint, Miller. And he did—what?"

Miller shrugged his shoulders.

"Interested himself in the situation, caused a delay which was fatal, for the moment, to our success. He cross-questioned the child and our man had to save himself, alone."

Landon laughed again.

"And he knew, this cousin of mine? He knew whose child it was?"

"Not then, but now, I imagine. He has met him since, at the Tent Club. He has also met your late father-in-law."

"What? The Kite—old Jacob—he's there?"

"Personally superintending a situation which gets daily more impenetrable, for us. Each fright we give them adds another palisade to the defence."

Landon took up the letters which he had laid down and went on opening and glancing through them. He pursed up his lips into an obstinately set expression; he assumed the air of a bargainer who has reached the limit of his purpose. For he fully understood the drift of Mr. Miller's remarks.

"We had better be plain with each other," he said at last. "My little expedition to the States has been a failure. As a matrimonial proposition I am, for the present, out of the running. They told me to come again in a year's time. Title-hunting American women have short memories, but some beastly reporter recognized me and ran two columns of reminiscences of the trial. That queered me, and after all the decree is not made absolute for another six months."

"Is this anticipatory of the announcement that those eight hundred dollars are the only support between you and bed-rock after all?"

"You jump at my meaning. I'm going to take over the duties of your six, or of some of them, at any rate."

The other's gray eyes reviewed his companion with a keenly calculating glance. There was no irritation in it, rather there was satisfaction. Mr. Miller did not present the aspect of a man whose chances of receiving a debt of one hundred and twenty pounds had been made doubtful. He had more the look of a bull speculator watching a tape as the eighths and sixteenths are added every few minutes to the stock which he commands.

"You will fail," he said drily. "Without funds you must fail. One poor man, in spite of the story books, can do nothing against a hundred and wealth."

"Possibly," said Landon. "But one may be permitted to try."

"No," said the other, stolidly. "One may not be permitted, in Tangier."

Landon looked up and for a moment silence hung heavily between the two men. The one who stood was the picture of heavy, imperturbable resolution. Landon, sitting back in his chair, was animate with energy, with a sort of tenseness which was almost magnetic. It was as if a panther faced a rhinoceros.

Then Landon shrugged his shoulders.

"Am I being threatened, my dear Miller?" he asked quietly.

"You are being informed," said the other. "The Syndicate which I represent is willing to finance you, for an adequate return. Without that it proposes to make Tangier an impossible residence for you."

Landon stared his surprise and his obvious relief.

"They are going to speculate in me?" He pondered for a moment. "I don't promise, or I haven't promised, that I shall allow old Jacob to buy the child back, if we get him, at all."

Miller nodded weightily.

"That does not matter to us," he announced. "That is as you like."

Landon's eyes were still wide and debating.

"Then your return comes—where?" he asked.

"We are willing to wait for it," said the other. "The first service we require from you is that you will renew your acquaintance with your cousin, Captain Aylmer, and endeavor to remove the distaste which I regret to think he feels for your company."

Landon bent forward, leaned his elbows on the table and his chin on his closed fists. He stared at his companion with a concentrated, dispassionate examination which seemed to probe and fathom through the depths of the other's impenetrability.

Miller met the scrutiny with no other manifestation than an, if possible, increase of apathy.

Landon dropped his hands slowly upon the table and gave his head a tiny shake.

"I don't understand you," he said. "Why has my cousin a distaste for my society? We have never been in collision. As a matter of fact, he was best man at my wedding."

"It is to be supposed that he read the account of your divorce," said the other, stolidly. "He has now made the acquaintance of your wife's relations."

"I see," said Landon, slowly. "Is that all?"

"Isn't it enough? Are you generally received?"

There was something callous, almost brutal, in the man's tone. The tiny spot of color which began to burn in Landon's sallow cheek was evidence that he recognized it.

"So," he answered, "I am to eat dirt at the hands of Captain John Aylmer? I am to appear to like it? Why?"

"Because," said Miller, dispassionately, "you are practically penniless. That is your side of the question. Our side is that your cousin happens to be what he is—Secretary to the Military Works Commission, who hold the immediate future of Gibraltar in their hands."

For the second time, and through a longer silence, the two stared at each other. As the fiery torch of comprehension burned brightly on Landon's face, rose to his forehead, seemed, indeed, to gleam in his eyes, his lips, which were at first grim and rigid, curled slowly into a sneer.

"By the Lord!" he swore. "By the Lord, Miller, you have an impudence!"

"I have a knowledge of values," said the other, impassively. "I wish to get my commission both ways. I expect it from you, because you get the job from no one else. I expect it from my employers, because you are practically the only tool at present, which they can use. I am perfectly open with you."

"As open as the Pit!" snarled Landon. "As candid as midnight! Let's have a taste of it plainly. What is it you want of me—robbery?"

Miller made a gesture of deprecation.

"I want you to—borrow—unknown to your cousin, certain books, the nature of which will be indicated to you in detail."

"And if I don't?"

"You must, at any rate, try."

"And if I won't?"

Miller smiled.

"We don't discuss absurdities."

There was nothing manifestly menacing in this, but there was a sense of finality. It reached Landon like a shaft of cold air blown in through the suddenly opened door. Mentally he flinched from it; he lifted his shoulders into a shrug of resignation.

"Where are his quarters?"

"In the South Town near my own cottage. For the moment that does not matter. You meet him to-morrow, by accident. You do not know, you see, that he is here?"

He consulted a small time-table.

"We should be on the quay about three-thirty to-morrow, when the steamer gets in from Tangier."

For the second time Landon expressed surrender with a passive shrug.