The public outside grumbled; nothing could be done till the allotment was declared. They would have grumbled less had they seen the grinding work of those ten days. Every morning the mass of letters was sorted, the list of names drawn up, and with strict commercial probity every single application passed before each of the directors. On the fifth day Mr Burden’s head was lost, and Lord Benthorpe’s assent had become mechanical. Mr Barnett, on the contrary, became more and more eager, more and more exact as the work proceeded. Before the close of the sixth day, his brain alone was sitting in judgment over that mass of papers; it was fortunate, for on the remaining four days the most delicate part of the work remained to be done. There did indeed pass by Mr Burden one or two incongruous things that troubled him. Canon Cone had sent no cheque. Mr Barnett would make himself responsible for that. Major Pondo, whom Mr Burden had always regarded as a poor, adventurous man, applied for fifteen thousand shares. The secretary of that politician who had most consistently denounced the financial side of our colonial expansion applied for ten thousand. There were perhaps a dozen incidents of this sort which Mr Burden could not fit in with what he had known of the world. But the work was too pressing and too exacting to leave energy for comment, or even for hesitation. All these discrepancies made upon Mr Burden’s mind only one general and blurred effect: to wit, that his own judgment was doubtful, and that society around him was more complex, and perhaps more perilous, than he had imagined. On the 19th the allotment was declared. On the morning of the 21st, though no sales had taken place, the anxious informal bidding, which went on in the house, and afterwards in the street, and even privately between individuals (rigorously as etiquette forbids such things) was offering two and one-sixteenth, two and one-eighth, two and a quarter before evening. The prices began to be talked of, and the selling to be regular within three days; and the price then was over four. The shares rose with the steady movement of a balloon, up on an accelerating curve; “M. D. D.’s.” changing hands with such rapidity, that it was no longer possible to come to any conclusion with regard to the individual motives of the more important buyers and sellers. The pace was the pace of a crusade. As religions take men or the enthusiasms of war, so the public had come to believe in themselves and the M’Korio; in what they could _do_ with the new province. They saw the Delta already drained, already mined—as it will be mined and drained—they saw that the nominal capital of this new company was the petty ransom of a great kingdom in the future of England. By Wednesday, the 26th, the shares were at seven.