The gold travelling clock on the mantelshelf struck the hour. Nine o’clock. Despard pushed back his chair, took a pull at his cigar, sighed, and then, looking at the clock, frowned. Evidently the visitor he expected was not coming. Nearly two years had passed since he successfully floated the radium mine at Blackthorn Farm. For several months his little venture had threatened to sink. It had been more difficult than he supposed to get people to believe in radium. The public wanted something they could see and handle for their money. Radium was a little too elusive. But Despard, for all his faults, was a fighter, especially when he had something for which to fight. He had got two or three people with a small amount of money to believe in him—and in radium. Some of those people had influence. So, after many weary months of working up a slow but steady boom, and by a brilliant system of advertisement, the company had been successfully floated and launched, and the public had come in at first slowly and hesitatingly, but eventually with a rush which was accelerated by an unexpected boom on the Stock Exchange. The one-pound shares in the radium mine, fully paid up, mounted from five shillings to par. From this they suddenly boomed to twenty-five shillings, and then gradually and steadily rose until they were quoted at three pound ten. Sir Reginald Crichton and one or two other members of the original syndicate, though honestly believing in the venture, were surprised. So far, no radium had been extracted from the pitch-blende—though the reports were excellent and full of encouragement. But Crichton expected he would have to wait some years before he got a return for his money. Now, if he chose to sell his shares he knew he might realise a small fortune. But Despard begged him to wait. "They’ll touch five pounds yet," he said. His nerve, which had never deserted him during the early days of the venture, when people had frankly laughed at the idea of radium being discovered in Devonshire, when there was real danger of utter failure, and rumours of fraud echoed in his ears, now began to fail him. He knew he could trust old Dale, Sir Reginald Crichton, and a few other men who had been nothing more nor less than his dupes. It was his friends in the City, sharks like himself, whom he could not trust. Men who had helped finance the company and boom it; the men who had forced up the price of shares originally when they were worth as many pennies as they were quoted in shillings. Gold had been the god at whose shrine Despard had always worshipped. For he believed that money could purchase anything, even the love of woman. Even the love of the woman he had grown to desire more than any other, more than anything else in the world, save wealth—Marjorie Dale.