ter as the latter
went down the street. About his thin-lipped, square-framed mouth hovered
an expression that might have been a smile, or an intense look of
interest, or a touch of avaricious ferocity. The gray eyes peeped over
the wall of their lower lids, and in them, too, was the unfathomable
something.

"Yes," he repeated, as though Porter still stood beside him, "if Langdon
tried to deceive me, I'd crush him. Poor old Porter with his story of
the strawberries! If he were as clever as he is honest, he wouldn't have
been stuck with a horse like Lauzanne. I told Langdon to get rid of that
quitter, but I almost wish he'd found another buyer for him. The horse
taint is pretty strong in that Porter blood. How the girl said that
line,

'And a hush came over the clamorous mob;
Like a babe on his neck I was sobbing.'

She's cleverer than her father."

Crane sat for an hour. Porter had vanished from the landscape, but still
the Banker's thoughts clung to his personality as though the peeping
eyes saw nothing else.

From the time of the first loan obtained upon Ringwood, Crane had
coveted the place. It appealed to him with its elm-bordered, sweeping
driveway, leading from gate to old colonial residence. Its thick-grassed
fields and running water made it just the place for a man who tempered
his passion for racing with common sense. And it would pass from
Porter's hands right enough--Crane knew that. Porter might call it ill
luck, but he, Crane the Banker, knew it was the lack of something, the
inability to make money.

"Made music to me on Crusader." Yes, that was it. With the Porters it
was jingle of spurs, and stride of the horse. All very fine in theory,
but racing, as he looked at it, was a question of proper odds, and many
other things connected with the betting ring.

Why did the girl, Allis, with her jingling verse creep into his mind.
Perhaps it was because she was so different from the woman who was
always steeped in stephanotis. Of the one there was only the memory
of an unmodulated voice and oppressive perfume; in truth, of the other
there was not much more--just a pair of big, blue-gray, honest
eyes, that somehow stared at him fearlessly, and withal with a great
sweetness.

Crane suddenly chuckled in dry disapprobation of himself. Grotesquely
enough, all at once he remembered that he was forty--that very day
forty. He ran his hand over his waistcoat, dipped two fingers into the
pocket a