Little Riggs sighed despondently. This meeting would soon be over and the decision made, after which he would have to face a totally unexpected set of conditions and a circle of friends and investors who would regard him with close and uncomfortable interest. "Well, I suppose it's shut up!" he hazarded unsteadily. Birch looked inquiringly at the other two, who nodded without speaking, then began to write. The rest did not even glance at each other, but found absorption in walls and windows and the big map of poignant memory, while the long, waxen fingers moved inexorably on. "What about this?" "'Under existing conditions and the impossibility of making immediate financial arrangements for current needs directors decide best to close down all work of every kind at once, giving notice that this will be only temporary. You will report here as soon as in your judgment you can wisely come down.' Is that all right?" Stoughton bit at his thumbnail and nodded. "I suppose so--and there'll be hell to pay in St. Marys, eh, Wimperley? Our friend the chief constable will be working over time. Remember the beggar? The damn fool was right too." "Yes, it's all right," said Wimperley, "and now I suppose there'll be writs and injunctions enough to fill the tailrace. We'd better get out and arrange some support for the market. Birch, you compound a comforting statement for the papers. We adjourn till tomorrow at nine-thirty." They did adjourn, but lingered for an hour digging into the past seven years. It was a talk such as one might expect under the circumstances. Charged with an apprehension but thinly veiled by manner and speech, events took on for them no perspective. They were too close at hand. All this was so intimately their own and Clark's responsibility that every other consideration became instantly submerged, and it was a matter of living for the day, if not for the hour. Had any one at this time told Wimperley or Stoughton that for a pace or two they had merely fallen out of step in the march of progress, and that however depressing might be the present aspect of affairs it did not really affect the preordained outcome, they would have flouted the thought. It is not given to many men to place themselves correctly in the general scheme of the world, and to fairly estimate their own contribution. Thus it was that Wimperley and his associates read on the screen of the present only the word "failure," and were conscious chiefly of a certain self contempt for the arduous part they had played. At the last moment success had been snatched from their grasp.