Julian shook his head.
“No, of course not,” he said lightly. “Only a little occasional lark, don’t you know. I leave the big things to clever fellows like you. By-the-bye, Loring, I’d no idea you did anything in that way.”
Loring puffed slowly at his cigar before he answered.
“I’m an old hand,” he said nonchalantly. “I wait for certainties, my boy!” He paused again. “To tell you the truth,” he said slowly, fastening a keen, cleverly-veiled gaze on Julian’s face, “I did not ask the question altogether idly. It occurred to me that if you had made anything worth mentioning you might be on the look-out for a means of—well, we’ll put it mildly and say—increasing it.”
There was considerable meaning in Loring’s voice, careless as it was. Julian became very still, and into his eyes there crept an eager, hungry light which harmonised ill with the fixed nonchalance of the rest of his features as he answered with a laugh:
“I don’t know the fellow who could refuse to admit that soft impeachment! We’re all in the same boat as far as that goes, I take it. You haven’t got a good thing up your sleeve, old man, have you?”
Loring smiled ambiguously.
“Most ‘good things’ would come to an untimely end if every one with a finger in them spread them abroad, my boy!” he observed. “Since it can’t concern you personally—if you’ve no capital—we’ll say no more about it.”
A certain amount of Loring’s practice dealt with financial affairs; he was no mean authority on City matters, and there was something about his manner indescribably provocative. Julian leaned forward with a movement of irrepressible eagerness.
“Is it really a good thing?” he said. He spoke with a quick, low-toned directness which put aside the fencing of the previous dialogue, and replied not to what Loring had said, but to what he had implied. Loring looked him full in the face and answered laconically and significantly: