"It all comes of treating the thing as a business proposition," he told himself.
But there was far more in his heart than this sober resolution.

He was intoxicated with the resurgence of youth and felt a rapture of audacity which he never remembered in his decorous boyhood.

"I haven't been doing badly for an old man," he reflected with glee.

What, oh what had become of the pillar of commerce, the man who might have been a bailie had he sought municipal honours, the elder in the Guthrie Memorial Kirk, the instructor of literary young men?
In the past three days he had levanted with jewels which had once been an Emperor's and certainly were not his; he had burglariously entered and made free of a strange house; he had played hide-and-seek at the risk of his neck and had wrestled in the dark with a foreign miscreant; he had shot at an eminent solicitor with intent to kill; and he was now engaged in tramping the world with a fairytale Princess.

I blush to confess that of each of his doings he was unashamedly proud, and thirsted for many more in the same line.