“Well, if I can say it without offense, I’m honestly sorry for you, Mr. Ford; you’ve been butchered to make a Broad Street holiday,” said Adair, lounging toward the door.  “You are going back to the West, I suppose?”

“Yes.”

“What line?”

“Pennsylvania; five-ten this afternoon.”

“That is a long time between drinks.  Suppose you come up to the club and have luncheon with me?”

Ford hesitated, watch in hand.

“I was about to lie to you, Mr. Adair, and plead business; but I shan’t.  I’ll tell you the plain truth.  I’m too sore just now to be any good fellow’s good company.”

“Which is precisely the reason why I asked you,” laughed the golden youth.  “Come on; let’s go now.  You can take it out on me as much as you like, you know.  I shan’t mind.”

But the club luncheon ignored the business affair completely, as Adair intended it should.  Ford came out of the shell of disappointment with the salad course, and by way of reparation for his former attitude talked rather more freely of himself than he was wont to do on such short acquaintance with any one.  The young millionaire met him quite half-way on this road to a better understanding, contrasting with mild envy Ford’s well-filled, busy life with his own erratic efforts at time-killing.

“You make me half sorry for myself,” he said, when they went to the smoking-room to light their cigars.  “It’s no less than a piteous misfortune when a fellow’s father has beaten all the covers of accomplishment for him.”

Ford could laugh now without being bitter.

“The game isn’t all corralled, even for you, Mr. Adair.  There was excellent good shooting for you in that directors’ meeting this morning, but you wouldn’t take the trouble.”

“That’s the fact,” was the easy-going rejoinder.  “That is just what my sister is always telling me—­that I won’t take the trouble.  And yet I do take the trouble to begin a lot of things; only they never seem worth while after a few days’ dip into them.”

“Pick out bigger ones,” suggested Ford.  “My trouble is just the other way about; I am always tackling things that are worlds too big for me—­just as I have this time.”

“It isn’t too big for you, Mr. Ford.  It was too big for Colbrith, Magnus, et al.  And, besides, you’re not going to give it up.  You’ll drop off in Chicago, hunt up some meat-packer or other Croesus, and land your new railroad independently of the P. S-W.”

It was a measure of the sincerity of Ford’s liking for his host when he said:  “That little shot of mine at your colleagues was merely a long bluff.  If my scheme can’t be worked with the P. S-W., it can’t well be worked without it.  We are lacking the two end-links in the chain—­which I could forge.  But my two end-links without the middle one wouldn’t attract anybody.”

It was quite late in the afternoon when they left the club, and Ford had no more than time to check his luggage and get to his train.  He wondered a little when Adair went with him to the ferry, and was not ungrateful for the hospitality which seemed to be directed toward a lightening of the burden of failure.  But Adair’s word of leave-taking, flung across the barrier when the chains of the landing-stage were rattling to their rise, was singularly irrelevant.