Vane's face set hard.
"I anticipated something of the kind last night; I saw how you kept clear of the matter."
"But you said nothing."
"No. I'd had time to consider the thing while I lay here, and it didn't look as if I could have got an intelligible account out of you. But you may as well mention how much Nairn got."
He lay smoking silently for a few minutes after he learned the amount, and Carroll was strongly moved to sympathy. He felt that it was not the financial reverse but one indirect result of it which would hit his comrade hardest.
"Well," Vane said grimly, "I suppose I've done what my friends would consider a mad thing in coming up here—and I must face the reckoning."
Carroll wondered whether their conversation could be confined to the surface of the subject, because there were depths beneath it that it would be better to leave undisturbed.
"After all, you're far from broke," he encouraged him. "You have what the Clermont stock brought in, and you may make something out of this shingle scheme."
There was bitterness in Vane's laugh.
"When I left Vancouver for England I was generally supposed to be well on the way to affluence, and there was some foundation for the idea. I had floated the Clermont in the face of opposition; people believed in me; I could have raised what money I required for any new undertaking. Now a good deal of my money and all of my prestige is gone; people have very little confidence in a man who has shown himself a failure. What's more, I may be a cripple. My leg will probably have to be broken again."