The next morning, he and Clare travelled up to town together, and at the station he put her in the motor which was to take her to Long Island, and hastened down to Moffatt’s office.  When he arrived he was told that Moffatt was “engaged,” and he had to wait for nearly half an hour in the outer office, where, to the steady click of the type-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 thing’s as safe as a bank.”