“Saw him this morning. He told me things were beginning to move. It was that paragraph yesterday that did it!”
“And what about keeping it up?” said Julian. “This is the ticklish moment, I take it! What’s the next move?”
He had thrown himself into a chair as he spoke; his voice was jerking with eagerness, as though some of his excitement were finding expression. Loring looked at him for an instant before he answered. He was asking himself a question which had formulated itself in his mind more than once in the last month; namely, was it merely the influence of his blood which made young Romayne so keen a speculator; or was there something concealed in the background of his life which made money a desperate necessity with him?
“This is the next move,” he answered, indicating the sheets of manuscript paper which lay before him. “This will be in one or two of the papers to-morrow, and if I’m not mistaken it will have a big effect!”
Julian stretched out his hand impulsively for the sheets and ran through them, now and then breaking into an eager comment; and as he finished he rose impetuously and began to pace excitedly up and down the room. His face was flushed now, and his eyes glowing.
“Yes, that ought to take us a long way!” he said. “And Ramsay backing it up all the while, of course? Loring, what do you make of it? An affair of—weeks?”
“An affair of two or three weeks, all told!” returned Loring nonchalantly. “The inside of a month ought to put the best part of thirty thousand into each of our pockets, my boy.”
He rose as he spoke, and gathered together the sheets of manuscript, but as he did so his quick ear caught a strange, sharp catch in Julian’s breath. He fastened up the papers, and directed them with another of those slight smiles, and then turned again to the younger man. Julian was standing at the window staring almost stupidly out.
“I’m going to turn you out now!” said Loring lightly. “Coming down to the club with me?”