Crane sat looking through the open window at John Porter 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