10 ANGEL PAVEMENT

disastrous affair at Riga, and sat silent, with the tears it)
his eyes, for the next twenty minutes.

"Well, I'll tell you," said Mr. Golspie, taking out his
cigar and looking at it very knowingly, as if it was a
fellow conspirator. 'There's no need to make a mystery
of it. D'you remember Mikorsky? Wait a minute. Not
the little fellow with the office in Danzig, but the big-
fellow with the beard, in the timber trade. That's the
one. Remember him?"

The captain did, and was evidently so pleased by this
effort of memory that he appeared to conduct several
bars of one of the stormier symphonies. The mate re-
membered, too, but only nodded, his tearful blue eyes
being still fixed on that tragic interior in Riga. The
chief engineer did not remember Mikorsky, and, in
what seemed nothing less than mental anguish, repeated
the name in twenty different tones, beginning very high
and ending in a despairing bass.

"I've done one or two little jobs for him," Mr. Golspie
continued,' during the time I had a bit of a pull. We'd
a night or two together, too. I met him one day, not a
month ago, and he said he was just going down into the
country, to see his cousin, and I ought to go with him.
So I did. I'd nothing better to do. Hot as hell it was
down there, too, and I was bitten to death. This cousin
of Mikorsky's was in the furniture end of the timber
trade, and he'd invented a new process, machine, treat-
ment, everything, for turning out veneers and inlays.
And labour costs next to nothing down there. I asked
where all this stuff was going. Well, they'd got orders
from Germany and Czechoslovakia and Austria and a
chance of something in Paris. 'What's it going to cost
in London?* I said, showing 'em one of their lines, and