know a
little--just the little that Mrs. Blount has seen fit to tell me--and no
more. There is trouble threatening; some dreadful trouble. I saw it
yesterday when you were so miserable; I can see it in your eyes this
minute."

Blount got up and began to pace the floor so that she might not see his
eyes. He was no more proof against such an appeal than any lover gladly
ready to bare his soul to the woman chosen out of a world of women for
his confidant and second self would be.

"I want to tell you," he affirmed, wheeling abruptly to face her; "I
wanted to tell you yesterday, only it was too horrible. You will know it
all when I say that by this time to-morrow the whole State will be
ringing with the story of David Blount's degradation and ruin; and
I--his only son, Patricia--I shall be the one who will have betrayed him
and brought it to pass!"

She blanched a little at that, and there was a great horror in her
eyes. But he noted at the moment, and remembered it afterward, that she
did not push him into the harrowing details, as another woman might have
done.

"You are very sure, I suppose?" she said gently.

He drew the packet of affidavits from his pocket.

"This is the evidence: sworn statements incriminating my father and many
others."

"You had those papers yesterday?"

"No. I got up last night to keep my appointment with the man who brought
them. But you see now why I can't go to Wartrace with you."

"I see that you are going to do something for which you will never,
never be able to forgive yourself," she said gravely. "You are going to
make use of those papers?"

He sat down and stared gloomily at her. "Patricia, I have taken a solemn
oath. The law which I have sworn to uphold is greater than--" He was
going to say, "greater than any man's claim for immunity," but she
finished the sentence otherwise for him.

"Is greater than your love for your father. I suppose I ought to be able
to understand that, but I am not. Evan, you can't do it--you mustn't do
it; every drop of that father's blood in your veins ought to cry out
against it."

"Ah!" he exclaimed with a sudden indrawing of his breath. "You don't
know what it is costing me!"

"Truly, I don't," she asserted calmly. "Your father is a great and good
man. If he had a daughter instead of a son, she would know and
understand." Then, in a quick and generous upflash of feeling: "I wish
he had a daughter--I wish I were she! I should try to show him