sir, it would seem a trifle."

"To any one like me! Listen." He leaned forward, with feverish eyes, and
spoke slowly, tapping on the table-cloth as he did so. "For half a
million dollars I'd sell my soul."

Davenant resisted the impulse to glance at Temple, who spoke promptly,
while Guion swallowed thirstily a glass of cognac.

"That's a good deal for a soul, Henry. It's a large amount of the sure
and tangible for a very uncertain quantity of the impalpable and
problematical."

Davenant laughed at this more boisterously than the degree of humor
warranted. He began definitely to feel that sense of discomfort which in
the last half-hour he had been only afraid of. It was not the
commonplace fact that Guion might be short of money that he dreaded; it
was the possibility of getting a glimpse of another man's inner secret
self. He had been in this position more than once before--when men
wanted to tell him things he didn't want to know--when, whipped by
conscience or crazed by misfortune or hysterical from drink, they tried
to rend with their own hands the veil that only the lost or the
desperate suffer to be torn. He had noted before that it was generally
men like Guion of a high strung temperament, perhaps with a feminine
streak in it, who reached this pass, and because of his own reserve--his
rather cowardly reserve, he called it--he was always impelled to run
away from them. As there was no possibility of running away now, he
could only dodge, by pretending to misunderstand, what he feared Guion
was trying to say.