It was certain to be cast, but Hepplestal’s was retorting on him with unexpected power. Mary was right: the bigness of Hepplestal’s had been escaping him. From London the sale had seemed no more than signatures on documents, and a check. Up here, confronted with Staithley Mills as so much brick, mortar and machinery, and confronted with no more than one crude loyalist in the yard and half a dozen grayboards of the Service in the office, the thing loomed colossal. Let it loom: he held its future in the hollow of his hand, and this, of all times, was no moment for second thoughts. He had to tackle William, the waverer, the fence-sitter who must be met with firmness, and not by one who was himself momentarily awed by the bigness of Hepplestal’s into being a waverer. With the air of nailing his colors to the mast, even if they were the skull and crossbones, he recovered his resolution in the moment when that ambassadorial figure, the Chief Cashier of Hepplestall’s, threw open William’s door and announced “Sir Rupert Hepplestall”; and a grave assurance, inflexible and self-reliant, seemed to enter the room with him. William raised careworn eyes as this bright incarnation of sanguine youth came into the office in which he sat almost as if it were a condemned cell. He knew, better than Rupert who knew the Hepplestalls so little, what wrath would come when they two faced an outraged Board, and this sedate, this almost smiling confidence seemed to him as offensive as buffoonery at a funeral. “You look very cheerful,” he greeted his nephew resentfully. “Why not?” said Rupert. “It’s a mistake to call optimism a cheap virtue. How are you, Uncle?” “I suppose you slept last night,” was the reply from which Rupert was to gather that sleep at such a crisis was considered gross. “Yes, thanks,” he said. “At Matlock. I drove up quietly, because I wanted to think. Really, of course, I’d decided in the first five minutes after opening your letter.” “You decided very quickly,” said William, who had come to no decision. “My wife made the same remark,” said Rupert. “But that’s a day and a half ago, and my first opinion stands. I’ve decided to sell.” Speaking, he gave a just perceptible jerk of the head which William remembered as a characteristic of Sir Philip when he, too, announced one of his quick decisions, and the little movement was not a grateful sight to William. Sir Philip’s son had his father’s trick and, it seemed, his father’s way of arriving rapidly at a conclusion. William, victim to irresolution as he always was, was sliding off his fence into opposition, through nothing more logical than jealousy of this boy who had the gift of making up his mind swiftly. “Am I to understand that your wife has other views?” he asked. It was hardly likely in such a wife, in an actress, but Rupert’s words seemed to suggest that Mary had given him pause, and if William was going to oppose this headstrong boy, any ally, however unlikely, would be welcome.