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A telephone buzzed. Irritation was swift on his face.

‘For heaven’s sake answer it, Parker, he commanded. ‘If it is some silly stock-gambling female, tell her I’m dead, or drunk, or down with typhoid, or getting married, or anything calamitous.’

After a moment’s dialogue, conducted on Parker’s part, in the discreet and modulated tones that befitted absolutely the cool, chaste, noble dignity of the room, with a ‘One moment, sir,’ into the transmitter, he muffled the transmitter with his hand and said:

‘It’s Mr. Bascom, sir. He wants you.’

‘Tell Mr. Bascom to go to hell,’ said Francis, simulating so long a cast, that, had it been in verity a cast, and had it pursued the course his fascinated gaze indicated, it would have gone through the window and most likely startled the gardener outside kneeling over the rose bush he was planting.

‘Mr. Bascom says it’s about the market, sir, and that he’d like to talk with you only a moment,’ Parker urged, but so delicately and subduedly as to seem to be merely repeating an immaterial and unnecessary message.

‘All right.’ Francis carefully leaned the rod against a table and went to the ‘phone.

‘Hello,’ he said into the telephone. ‘Yes, this is I, Morgan. Sboot? What is it?’

He listened for a minute, then interrupted irritably: ‘Sell hell. Nothing of the sort… Of course, I’m glad to know. Even if it goes up ten points, which it won’t, hold on to everything. It may be a legitimate rise, and it mayn’t ever come down. It’s solid. It’s worth far more than it’s listed. I know, if the public doesn’t. A year from now it’ll list at two hundred… that is, if Mexico can cut the revolution stuff… Whenever it drops you’ll have buying orders from me… Nonsense. Who wants control? It’s purely sporadic… eh? I beg your pardon. I mean it’s merely temporary. Now I’m going off fishing for a fortnight. If it goes down five points, buy. Buy all that’s offered. Say, when a fellow’s got a real bona fide property, being bulled is almost as bad as having the bears after one… yes… Sure… yes. Good-bye.’

And while Francis returned delightedly to his fishing-rods, Destiny, in Thomas Regan’s down-town private office, was working overtime. Having arranged with his various brokers to buy, and, through his divers channels of secret publicity having let slip the cryptic tip that something was wrong with Tampico Petroleum’s concessions from the Mexican government, Thomas Regan studied a report of his own oil-expert emissary who had spent two months on the spot spying out what Tampico Petroleum really had in sight and prospect.

A clerk brought in a card with the information that the visitor was importunate and foreign. Regan listened, glanced at the card, and said:

‘Tell this Mister Señor Alvarez Torres of Ciodad de Colon that I can’t see him.’