Thorpe put out his lips a trifle, and looked away for an instant in frowning abstraction. “If it were put in that way--I think I should sell,” he said. “It's all right for me to take long chances--it's my game--but there's no reason why you should risk things. But let me put it in still another way,” he added, with the passing gleam of a new thought over the dull surface of his eye. “What do you say to our making the transaction strictly between ourselves? Here are shares to bearer, in the safe there. I say that two thousand of them are yours: that makes them yours. I give you my cheque for thirty thousand pounds--here, now, if you like--and that makes them mine again. The business is finished and done with--inside this room. Neither of us is to say anything about it to a soul. Does that meet your views?”
The diplomat pondered the proposition--again with a lengthened perturbation of the eyelids. “It would be possible to suggest a variety of objections, if one were of a sophistical turn of mind,” he said at last, smilingly reflective. “Yet I see no really insuperable obstacle in the path.” He thought upon it further, and went on with an enquiring upward glance directed suddenly at Thorpe: “Is there likely to be any very unpleasant hubbub in the press--when it is known that the annual meeting has been postponed?”
Thorpe shook his head with confidence. “No--you need have no fear of that. The press is all right. It's the talk of the City, I'm told--the way I've managed the press. It isn't often that a man has all three of the papers walking the same chalk-line.”
The Marquis considered these remarks with a puzzled air. Then he smiled faintly. “I'm afraid we're speaking of different things,” he suggested. “Apparently you refer to the financial papers. I had scarcely given them a thought. It does not seem to me that I should mind particularly what they said about me--but I should care a great deal about the other press--the great public press.”
“Oh, what do they know about these things?” said Thorpe, lightly. “So far as I can see, they don't know about anything, unless it gets into the police court, or the divorce court, or a court of some kind. They're the funniest sort of papers I ever saw. Seems as if they didn't think anything was safe to be printed until it had been sworn to. Why anybody should be afraid of them is more than I can see.”