pe-writer and
the spasmodic buzzing of the telephone, his thoughts again began their
restless circlings. Finally the inner door opened, and he found himself
in the sanctuary. Moffatt was seated behind his desk, examining another
little crystal vase somewhat like the one he had shown Ralph a few
weeks earlier. As his visitor entered, he held it up against the light,
revealing on its dewy sides an incised design as frail as the shadow of
grass-blades on water.

"Ain't she a peach?" He put the toy down and reached across the desk to
shake hands. "Well, well," he went on, leaning back in his chair, and
pushing out his lower lip in a half-comic pout, "they've got us in the
neck this time and no mistake. Seen this morning's Radiator? I don't
know how the thing leaked out--but the reformers somehow got a smell of
the scheme, and whenever they get swishing round something's bound to
get spilt."

He talked gaily, genially, in his roundest tones and with his easiest
gestures; never had he conveyed a completer sense of unhurried power;
but Ralph noticed for the first time the crow's-feet about his eyes, and
the sharpness of the contrast between the white of his forehead and the
redness of the fold of neck above his collar.

"Do you mean to say it's not going through?"

"Not this time, anyhow. We're high and dry."

Something seemed to snap in Ralph's head, and he sat down in the nearest
chair. "Has the common stock dropped a lot?"

"Well, you've got to lean over to see it." Moffatt pressed his
finger-tips together and added thoughtfully: "But it's THERE all right.
We're bound to get our charter in the end."

"What do you call the end?"

"Oh, before the Day of Judgment, sure: next year, I guess."

"Next year?" Ralph flushed. "What earthly good will that do me?"

"I don't say it's as pleasant as driving your best girl home by
moonlight. But that's how it is. And the stuff's safe enough any
way--I've told you that right along."

"But you've told me all along I could count on a rise before August. You
knew I had to have the money now."

"I knew you WANTED to have the money now; and so did I, and several of
my friends. I put you onto it because it was the only thing in sight
likely to give you the return you wanted."

"You ought at least to have warned me of the risk!"

"Risk? I don't call it much of a risk to lie back in your chair and wait
another few months for fifty thousand to drop into your lap. I tell you
the th