Clare Van Degen, in the light of this mood, became again the comrade of his boyhood.  He did not see her often, for she had gone down to the country with her children, but they communicated daily by letter or telephone, and now and then she came over to the Fairfords’ for a night.  There they renewed the long rambles of their youth, and once more the summer fields and woods seemed full of magic presences.  Clare was no more intelligent, she followed him no farther in his flights; but some of the qualities that had become most precious to him were as native to her as its perfume to a flower.  So, through the long June afternoons, they ranged together over many themes; and if her answers sometimes missed the mark it did not matter, because her silences never did.

Meanwhile Ralph, from various sources, continued to pick up a good deal of more or less contradictory information about Elmer Moffatt.  It seemed to be generally understood that Moffatt had come back from Europe with the intention of testifying in the Ararat investigation, and that his former patron, the great Harmon B. Driscoll, had managed to silence him; and it was implied that the price of this silence, which was set at a considerable figure, had been turned to account in a series of speculations likely to lift Moffatt to permanent eminence among the rulers of Wall Street.  The stories as to his latest achievement, and the theories as to the man himself, varied with the visual angle of each reporter:  and whenever any attempt was made to focus his hard sharp personality some guardian divinity seemed to throw a veil of mystery over him.  His detractors, however, were the first to own that there was “something about him”; it was felt that he had passed beyond the meteoric stage, and the business world was unanimous in recognizing that he had “come to stay.”  A dawning sense of his stability was even beginning to make itself felt in Fifth Avenue.  It was said that he had bought a house in Seventy-second Street, then that he meant to build near the Park; one or two people (always “taken by a friend”) had been to his flat in the Pactolus, to see his Chinese porcelains and Persian rugs; now and then he had a few important men to dine at a Fifth Avenue restaurant; his name began to appear in philanthropic reports and on municipal committees (there were even rumours of its having been put up at a well-known club); and the rector of a wealthy parish, who was raising funds for a chantry, was known to have met him at dinner and to have stated afterward that “the man was not wholly a materialist.”

All these converging proofs of Moffatt’s solidity strengthened Ralph’s faith in his venture.  He remembered with what astuteness and authority Moffatt had conducted their real estate transaction—­how far off and unreal it all seemed!—­and awaited events with the passive faith of a sufferer in the hands of a skilful surgeon.