in all cases the same, nor the breeding of the offenders. Pinney learned
that there were defaulters who were in society, and not merely because
they were defaulters for large sums and were of good social standing at
home, but because there were circumstances that attenuated their offence
in the eyes of the people of their city of refuge; they judged them by
their known intentions and their exigencies, as the justice they had
fled from could not judge them. There were other defaulters of a
different type and condition, whose status followed them: embezzlers who
had deliberately planned their misdeeds, and who had fallen from no
domestic dignity in their exclusion from respectable association abroad.
These Pinney saw in their walks about the town; and he was not too
proud, for the purposes of art, to make their acquaintance, and to study
in their vacancy and solitude the dulness and weariness of exile. They
did not consort together, but held aloof from one another, and professed
to be ignorant each of the affairs of the rest. Pinney sympathized in
tone if not in sentiment with them, but he did not lure them to the
confidence he so often enjoyed; they proved to be men of reticent
temper; when frankly invited to speak of their history and their hopes
in the interest of the reputations they had left behind them, they said
they had no statement to make.

It was not from them that Pinney could hope to learn anything of the man
he was seeking; Northwick was not of their order, morally or socially,
and from the polite circles where the more elect of the exiles moved,
Pinney was himself excluded by the habits of his life and by the choice
of the people who formed those circles. This seemed to Pinney rather
comical, and it might have led him to say some satirical things of the
local society, if it had been in him to say bitter things at all. As it
was, it amused his inexhaustible amiability that an honest man like
himself should not be admitted to the company of even the swellest
defaulters when he was willing to seek it. He regretted that it should
be so, mainly because Northwick could have been heard of among them, if
at all; and when all his other efforts to trace him at Quebec failed, he
did not linger there. In fact he had not expected to find him there, but
he had begun his search at that point, because he must stop there on his
way to Rimouski, where Northwick's letter to the _Events_ was posted.
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