“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?” Julian turned round, but the words seemed to penetrate slowly to his consciousness. “No!” he said at last. “No, thanks, old man. I--I’m going to get home.” He had to go to his own chambers first, it appeared, however, and Loring left him with a careless “All right! See you to-night, of course!” The sunshine had left Julian’s room, bright as it still was outside, and it looked, perhaps, the darker by contrast as he opened the door and shut himself in alone. He paused a moment, with his hand on the lock, and then walked aimlessly across to the writing-table and sat down. There was a pale, dazed look about him. The line in the evening paper at which he had gazed with such devouring eyes had chronicled the first important rise of those shares on which his hopes were staked; chronicled, in fact, the beginning of the end. As he sat there alone, the words seemed to stand out all about him; to meet his eyes in every direction; and it was little wonder that, as he realised that the seed so eagerly sown had indeed broken ground at last, the perfect fruit seemed to be already in his hand, and he was dazed and intoxicated with anticipated triumph. He had the blood of a speculator and a gambler in his veins, and as he sprang up suddenly from his chair and began to pace up and down the room, it was the surging of the speculator’s instinct that flushed his face and glittered in his eyes; the rioting of that money passion which, to the man who has never felt its fever, is the strangest and most repulsive--as it is the most abnormal--of all passions.