"You allow a good margin," said Max. "If I were allowed a preference, I should declare for the million. And pray what is this business?"
"Diamonds," answered Moreas quietly, as leaning across the table and clasping his hands together. "Diamonds such as you have never dreamed of. With the information I have received I tell you I am able to put my hand on the biggest diamond mine on the face of the habitable globe. How I obtained the information doesn't matter just now. I'll tell you about it another day. It is sufficient for the present that I am fully posted. Unfortunately, however, there are others, besides myself, who are acquainted with it. It is of those others that I am afraid. If the truth must be told, and you don't mind a simple pun, I might say it is a case of diamond cut diamond with us. I don't trust them, and I am not at all certain that they trust me. Now, situated as I am, what I want to do is to import another man into the concern, a man whose interests, though they must not be aware of it, will be identical with my own. Two of us would be a match for the whole pack of them. Particularly if I can get hold of a man who can use a pistol as you can. Taken all round, Mortimer, you're just the sort of fellow I want. You'd enjoy a piece of adventure of this kind. We should be away about four months, and I don't think you would be able to complain, when you returned, of having had a dull time of it. Now what have you to say?"
"It is impossible," said Max, though in his own mind he felt that he would have given anything to have been able to take a hand in it. "There was a time when I should have liked nothing better, but I have settled down to a staid business life now, and an affair such as you propose is quite out of the question."
"I am sorry for that," answered Moreas, his spirits visibly sinking as he heard the other's decision. "I had quite made up my mind that, when I told you about it, you would throw everything else to the dogs and go in for it with me. However, there is one good point about it. I have to go south to-day. I shall be back in Rio in about six weeks' time. Nobody knows how you may be situated then. If anything has happened, and it is possible for you to change your mind, all you have to do will be to send a letter to the old address, the same that I gave you eighteen months ago, and it will find me. We shall start as soon after I return as possible. Will you promise to bear this in mind?"
"I will remember it with pleasure," Max replied; "but you may rest assured it will be of no use. I am clinging to respectability like a limpet to his rock, and, so far as I can see now, nothing will shake me from it."
"You don't know how I had set my heart upon having you with me," answered Moreas. "It is at times like this that one wants a good man at one's elbow. I am not going alone with those other fellows; of that you may be very sure. If I did, I'd never come back alive. With you at my side, however, I wouldn't mind if there were a hundred of them."
"You pay me a very high compliment," said Max; "but I am afraid that, unless you can find somebody else to take my place, you will have to do as you fear, that is to say, go on alone."
"Well, I will put my trust in faith," said the other. "Stranger things than that have turned up trumps before now. I've got a very solid belief in my luck, and somehow I've got a fancy that it won't desert me."
"We shall see," replied Max, "and now, if you have no more to say to me, I think I must be going on."
"You're quite sure I can't tempt you?" said Moreas.