Gabriel Love greeted Master politely. When the waiters brought the food, he announced that he would say grace, which he did in a voice of great reverence. Then he let Sean provide most of the conversation until he had finished eating an entire chicken. Only then did he turn to Frank and inquire of him: “Are you a betting man, Mr. Master?”

“Once in a while,” said Master, guardedly.

“The way I see it,” said Gabriel Love, “a Wall Street man is a betting man. I’ve seen men bet all afternoon on which raindrop on a window is goin’ to reach the bottom first.” He nodded thoughtfully. “A Wall Street man is greedy, too. No harm in that. Without greed, I always say, there’d be no civilization. But the Wall Street man doesn’t have the patience to till the soil or manufacture things. He’s clever, but he’s not deep. He invests in companies, but he doesn’t much care what they are, or what they do. What he wants is to bet on them. Wall Street will always be full of young men, betting.”

“Young men?” Sean said. “What about older men, Gabriel?”

“Ah. Well now, as a young man gets older, he raises a family, takes on responsibilities. And then he changes—it’s only human nature. You see it on the street all the time. The man with responsibilities does not bet in the same way. His operations are different.”

“How different?”

Gabriel Love gazed at them both, and suddenly his pale blue eyes seemed to grow harder.

“He stacks the odds,” he said sharply.

He knew it. As Frank stared at the great, white, deceptive beard of Gabriel Love, every instinct told him it was time to leave.

Sean O’Donnell was one thing. Sean might kill you, but not if you were on his side. For some time, fate had linked them through Mary, and in other ways since. Sean he could trust. But Gabriel Love was another matter. Did he really want to get involved with him, at his time of life?

Master was nearly seventy-three years old. You wouldn’t have thought it to look at him—most people took him to be ten years younger. His hair was thin, and his mustache was white, but he was still a strong, good-looking man, and rather proud of it. He went to his counting house every day. And if, now and then, he felt a slight twinge of pain, or sense of tightness in the chest, he shrugged it off. If he was getting old, he didn’t want to know it.

But he enjoyed the respectability that his age and long career had earned him. His fortune was considerable, and he could easily augment it without taking unnecessary risks. He had his grandchildren to think of now. And Gabriel Love had just as good as told him that something dishonest was afoot. He started to rise.