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The Coppin family were at high tea when Roland reached home. There was a general stir of interest as he entered the room, for it was known that he had left that morning with the intention of approaching Mr. Fineberg on the important matter of a rise in salary. Mr. Coppin removed his saucer of tea from his lips. Frank brushed the tail of a sardine from the corner of his mouth. Percy ate his haddock in an undertone. Albert Potter, who was present, glowered silently.

Roland shook his head with the nearest approach to gloom which his rejoicing heart would permit.

“I’m afraid I’ve bad news.”

Mrs. Coppin burst into tears, her invariable practise in any crisis. Albert Potter’s face relaxed into something resembling a smile.

“He won’t give you your raise?”

Roland sighed.

“He’s reduced me.”

“Reduced you!”

“Yes. Times are bad just at present, so he has had to lower me to a hundred and ten.”

The collected jaws of the family fell as one jaw. Muriel herself seemed to be bearing the blow with fortitude, but the rest were stunned. Frank and Percy might have been posing for a picture of men who had lost their fountain pens.

Beneath the table the hand of Albert Potter found the hand of Muriel Coppin, and held it; and Muriel, we regret to add, turned and bestowed upon Albert a half-smile of tender understanding.

“I suppose,” said Roland, “we couldn’t get married on a hundred and ten?”

“No,” said Percy.

“No,” said Frank.

“No,” said Albert Potter.

They all spoke decidedly, but Albert the most decidedly of the three.

“Then,” said Roland regretfully, “I’m afraid we must wait.”

It seemed to be the general verdict that they must wait. Muriel said she thought they must wait. Albert Potter, whose opinion no one had asked, was quite certain that they must wait. Mrs. Coppin, between sobs, moaned that it would be best to wait. Frank and Percy, morosely devouring bread and jam, said they supposed they would have to wait. And, to end a painful scene, Roland drifted silently from the room, and went up-stairs to his own quarters.

There was a telegram on the mantel.

“Some fellows,” he soliloquized happily, as he opened it, “wouldn’t have been able to manage a little thing like that. They would have given themselves away. They would—-“

The contents of the telegram demanded his attention.

For some time they conveyed nothing to him. The thing might have been written in Hindustani.

It would have been quite appropriate if it had been, for it was from the promoters of the Calcutta Sweep, and it informed him that, as the holder of ticket number 108,694, he had drawn Gelatine, and in recognition of this fact a check for five hundred pounds would be forwarded to him in due course.

* * * * *

Roland’s first feeling was one of pure bewilderment. As far as he could recollect, he had never had any dealings whatsoever with these open-handed gentlemen. Then memory opened her flood-gates and swept him back to a morning ages ago, so it seemed to him, when Mr. Fineberg’s eldest son Ralph, passing through the office on his way to borrow money from his father, had offered him for ten shillings down a piece of cardboard, at the same time saying something about a sweep. Partly from a vague desire to keep in with the Fineberg clan, but principally because it struck him as rather a doggish thing to do, Roland had passed over the ten shillings; and there, as far as he had known, the matter had ended.

And now, after all this time, that simple action had borne fruit in the shape of Gelatine and a check for five hundred pounds.