tel for the present."

"I won't keep you five minutes when I get there," said Lapham; but he
did not come away till ten o'clock.

It appeared to him as if the very devil was in it. The Englishmen
treated his downright refusal to sell as a piece of bluff, and talked
on as though it were merely the opening of the negotiation. When he
became plain with them in his anger, and told them why he would not
sell, they seemed to have been prepared for this as a stroke of
business, and were ready to meet it.

"Has this fellow," he demanded, twisting his head in the direction of
Rogers, but disdaining to notice him otherwise, "been telling you that
it's part of my game to say this? Well, sir, I can tell you, on my
side, that there isn't a slipperier rascal unhung in America than
Milton K. Rogers!"

The Englishmen treated this as a piece of genuine American humour, and
returned to the charge with unabated courage. They owned now, that a
person interested with them had been out to look at the property, and
that they were satisfied with the appearance of things. They developed
further the fact that they were not acting solely, or even principally,
in their own behalf, but were the agents of people in England who had
projected the colonisation of a sort of community on the spot, somewhat
after the plan of other English dreamers, and that they were satisfied,
from a careful inspection, that the resources and facilities were those
best calculated to develop the energy and enterprise of the proposed
community. They were prepared to meet Mr. Lapham--Colonel, they begged
his pardon, at the instance of Rogers--at any reasonable figure, and
were quite willing to assume the risks he had pointed out. Something
in the eyes of these men, something that lurked at an infinite depth
below their speech, and was not really in their eyes when Lapham looked
again, had flashed through him a sense of treachery in them. He had
thought them the dupes of Rogers; but in that brief instant he had seen
them--or thought he had seen them--his accomplices, ready to betray the
interests of which they went on to speak with a certain comfortable
jocosity, and a certain incredulous slight of his show of integrity.
It was a deeper game than Lapham was used to, and he sat looking with a
sort of admiration from one Englishman to the other, and then to
Rogers, who maintained an exterior of modest neutrality, and whose air
said, "I have brought you gentlemen tog