"I am sorry, sir. I know it sounds impertinent but I've a rotten feeling that things—that things—" He broke off in distress.
"I'll trouble you to finish your sentence." The voice was like ice.
"Don't misunderstand me," the young man went valiantly on. "It isn't for myself, it's for you."
"Why me?" Clark's glance softened ever so little at the thought.
"New schemes are piling up every day. We're not out of one before we're into another."
"We?" The voice had a touch of irony.
"Yes, sir, we—because I'm with you to the end, whatever that may be. I don't care if I go to smash and lose my job, but what about you? I don't want to be disrespectful, but if this company fails it's you that will have failed. I won't count except to myself. You're doing more now than ten ordinary men. Isn't there enough without that?" Belding pointed across the river.
Then, to the young man's amazement, Clark began to laugh, not riotously but with a gradual abandonment that shook his thickset body with successive convulsions of mirth. Presently he wiped his eyes.
"Sit down, Belding, but first of all, thank you from the bottom of my heart. You make a brilliant contrast with a group I know who had to bolster themselves up for days to get courage to say something of the same kind, and they were thinking of their own skins, not mine. Now I want to tell you something."
Belding nodded. His brain was too confused for speech.