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Georgian silver. Pym remembered seeing in Szisco’s window neatly arranged cases of Georgian silver snuff-boxes, the meanest of which was priced at four pounds ten. One of them, much less beautiful than his, was for sale at fifteen pounds. Assuming that old Mr. Pym’s snuff-box was worth no more than ten pounds, could Szisco offer him less than five pounds for it?
    It was unreasonable to suppose that Szisco could be such a fool.
    He paid the bill and hurried out. The curdled grey sky had cleared. It was going to be a fine day. Everything had cleared. There was a pleasant smell in the air, and the passing girls looked friendly and beautiful. But there was no time to waste. Pym walked as fast as he could, scarcely pausing to look at the faces of the people who were waiting outside the Old Bailey, where someone was being tried on a charge of murder. His swinging right hand struck somebody’s wrist and he apologised gaily and profusely without turning his head. It was as if a window had been thrown open to let out some of the stale smoke in his head. Everything was clear and crisp. He had only to get the snuff-box. After that he could put down his money for thetypewriter, lay in some filling food—tinned herrings and potatoes for example—go home to Busto, slap down a week’s rent, run upstairs, sit down and finish the novel, hurry it to Egan & Dobbs, and collect fifty pounds. He was not a shallow-minded man, a wishful-thinker who lived for the moment: he knew that fifty pounds would not last for ever. Fifty pounds was not a large sum: in fact fifty pounds was nothing. Still, it would tide him over. He could get his best clothes out of pawn, buy more paper and some typewriter ribbons, pay a debt or two, and work comfortably for at least two months. In two months he could write another novel. Well-dressed, with a quarter of an inch of good shoe-leather solidly separating his feet from the floor, he could talk to an editor with confidence and, crossing his legs, feel free of frayed trousers and perforated socks.
    Pym danced rather than walked past the post office, and smiled in the musty gloom of the pawnshop as he put down his ticket like an ace of trumps, jingling the money in his pocket.
    The clerk, hairless and sickly yellow like the bulb that hung from the ceiling, untied a neat little bow in a piece of thin string and unwrapped the snuff-box. Then he took the money, and looked up grimacing as the door slammed.
    Pym was out of the office before the clerk had begun to refold the little piece of paper.
    He was prudent enough to walk a few yards to a bus stop from which it would cost him only three-halfpence to ride to Szisco’s. He exchanged badinage with the conductor and whistled a tune between his teeth. But at Szisco’s door he hesitated. The whistle went back into his mouth with a little hiss. He looked into Szisco’s window, which was full of silver. There were chafing-dishes for which he would not have given twopence, priced at scores of guineas; candlesticks which he would not have had as a gift, available for twenty-one pounds apiece; and there were snuff-boxes, the cheapest of which would cost you four pounds ten shillings. But Pym’s box was four inches long, three inches wide, and two inches deep—bigger than the snuff-box in the top left-hand corner which Szisco valued at nineteen guineas, and ever so much better engraved. There, still, hung the card: ‘OLD SILVER BOUGHT’. Pymdrew himself up, smoothed his coat, and walked into the shop.
    Until he felt the thudding of his heart he did not know that he was afraid. He had intended to smile, converse offhandedly, and come suavely to the market value of his box. But when he was confronted by an old man with hair that was neither black nor grey, dressed like a Consul-General in heavy cloth that was neither grey nor black, the virtue went out of him.
    Pym could only say: “I believe you buy silver?”
    The old man almost smiled.
    “… Rather valuable old