ing it.

The evening of this same day there was a dance given by the Gordons in
the ranchman candidate's big house opposite the Weatherfords' in Mesa
Circle, and Blount went, hoping that Patricia would be there. She was
there; and in the heart of the evening, when Blount had persuaded her to
sit out a dance with him in a corner of the homelike reception-hall, he
began to pry at a little stone of stumbling which was threatening to
grow too large to be easily rolled aside.

"I'm hunting a conscience to-night," he said, without preface. "Have you
got one that you could lend me?"

She laughed lightly.

"You told me once that I had the New England conscience--which was the
same as saying that I had enough for my own needs and a surplus to pass
around among my friends. What bad thing have you been doing now?"

He made a wry face. "It's the 'practical politics' again. Suppose I say
that I have obtained positive evidence of a crime against the laws of
the State and the nation. How far am I justified in suppressing, for a
perfectly right and proper end, this evidence which would send a lot of
people to jail?"

"Mercy!" she exclaimed; "how you can bring a thunderbolt crashing down
out of a perfectly clear sky! Is it ever justifiable to shield criminals
and criminality?"

"That is just what I'm trying to find out," he persisted. "At the
present moment I am shielding a good handful of open lawbreakers. Some
of them know what I'm doing, and some of them don't. Those who know
have been told that they must be good or I'll publish the evidence, and
they've promised to be good if I won't publish it. At the time I didn't
question my right to make such a bargain, but--"

"But now you are questioning it? What would happen if you should tell
what you know?"

"Chaos," he replied briefly.

"May I ask who is implicated?"

"A good half of the corporation officials in the State, and some few
outside of it."

"Mercy!" she said again. And then: "It's too big for me, Evan. I can
only go back to first principles and ask if it is ever justifiable to do
evil that good may come."

"If you put it that way, I've made myself _particeps criminis_," he said
gravely. "I have given my word to keep still if the lawbreaking deals
are broken off at once and in good faith. Beyond that, I can't help
knowing that the exposure which I have threatened to make, and could
make, would practically turn the people of this State into a mob."

She was sha