There would
be over twenty thousand others to be accounted for.
That would be quite enough for my purposes. Oh, I figured
all that out very carefully. My own first notion was
to have the dummies apply for the whole hundred thousand,
and even a little over. Then, you see, we might have
allotted everything to the dummies, and sent back the
money and applications of the genuine ones. But that
would have been rather hard to manage with the Board.
The Markiss would have said that the returns ought to be made
pro rata--that is, giving everybody a part of what they
applied for--and that would have mixed everything up.
And then, too, if anybody suspected anything, why the Stock
Exchange Committee would refuse us a special settlement--and,
of course, without that the whole transaction is moonshine.
It was far too risky, and we didn't send back a penny."
"It's all pretty risky, I should think," she declared
as she rose. "I should think you'd lie awake more than
ever now--now that you've built your hopes so high
and it'd be so awful to have them come to nothing."
He smilingly shook his head. "No, it can no more fail
than that gas can fail to burn when you put a light to it.
It's all absolute. My half-million is as right as if
it were lying to my credit in the Bank of England.
Oh, that reminds me," he went on in a slightly
altered tone--" it's damned comical, but I've got to ask
you for a little money.
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