Chapter 35

Within forty-eight hours Ralph's money was in Moffatt's hands, and the
interval of suspense had begun.

The transaction over, he felt the deceptive buoyancy that follows on
periods of painful indecision. It seemed to him that now at last life
had freed him from all trammelling delusions, leaving him only the best
thing in its gift--his boy.

The things he meant Paul to do and to be filled his fancy with happy
pictures. The child was growing more and more interesting--throwing out
countless tendrils of feeling and perception that delighted Ralph but
preoccupied the watchful Laura.

"He's going to be exactly like you, Ralph--" she paused and then risked
it: "For his own sake, I wish there were just a drop or two of Spragg in
him."

Ralph laughed, understanding her. "Oh, the plodding citizen I've become
will keep him from taking after the lyric idiot who begot him. Paul and
I, between us, are going to turn out something first-rate."

His book too was spreading and throwing out tendrils, and he worked
at it in the white heat of energy which his factitious exhilaration
produced. For a few weeks everything he did and said seemed as easy and
unconditioned as the actions in a dream.

Clare Van Degen, in the light of this mood, became again the comrade
of his boyhood. He did not see her often, for she had gone down to the
country with her children, but they communicated daily by letter or
telephone, and now and then she came over to the Fairfords' for a night.
There they renewed the long rambles of their youth, and once more the
summer fields and woods seemed full of magic presences. Clare was no
more intelligent, she followed him no farther in his flights; but some
of the qualities that had become most precious to him were as native to
her as its perfume to a flower. So, through the long June afternoons,
they ranged together over many themes; and if her answers sometimes
missed the mark it did not matter, because her silences never did.

Meanwhile Ralph, from various sources, continued to pick up a good deal
of more or less contradictory information about Elmer Moffatt. It seemed
to be generally understood that Moffatt had come back from Europe with
the intention of testifying in the Ararat investigation, and that his
former patron, the great Harmon B. Driscoll, had managed to silence him;
and it was implied that the price of this silence, which was set at
a considerable figure, had been turned to account in a series of
speculations likely to lift Moffatt to permanent eminence among the
rulers of Wall Street. The stories as to his latest achievement, and the
theories as to the man himself, varied with the visual angle of each
reporter: and whenever any