name off the list!" said Gorringe, with rising
passion. "I was a fool to ever have it there. To think of being a
probationer of yours--my God!"

"That will be a pity--from one point of view," remarked Theron, still
with the ironical smile on his lips. "You seemed to enter upon the new
life with such deliberation and fixity of purpose, too! I can imagine
the regrets your withdrawal will cause, in certain quarters. I only hope
that it will not discourage those who accompanied you to the altar,
and shared your enthusiasm at the time." He had spoken throughout with
studied slowness and an insolent nicety of utterance.

"You had better go away!" broke forth Gorringe. "If you don't, I shall
forget myself."

"For the first time?" asked Theron. Then, warned by the flash in the
lawyer's eye, he turned on his heel and sauntered, with a painstaking
assumption of a mind quite at ease, up the street.

Gorringe's own face twitched and his veins tingled as he looked after
him. He spat the shapeless cigar out of his mouth into the gutter, and,
drawing forth another from his pocket, clenched it between his teeth,
his gaze following the tall form of the Methodist minister till it was
merged in the crowd.

"Well, I'm damned!" he said aloud to himself.

The photographer had come down to take in his showcases for the night.
He looked up from his task at the exclamation, and grinned inquiringly.

"I've just been talking to a man," said the lawyer, "who's so much
meaner than any other man I ever heard of that it takes my breath away.
He's got a wife that's as pure and good as gold, and he knows it, and
she worships the ground he walks on, and he knows that too. And yet the
scoundrel is around trying to sniff out some shadow of a pretext for
misusing her worse than he's already done. Yes, sir; he'd be actually
tickled to death if he could nose up some hint of a scandal about
her--something that he could pretend to believe, and work for his own
advantage to levy blackmail, or get rid of her, or whatever suited his
book. I didn't think there was such an out-and-out cur on this whole
footstool. I almost wish, by God, I'd thrown him into the canal!"

"Yes, you lawyers must run against some pretty snide specimens,"
remarked the photographer, lifting one of the cases from its sockets.

CHAPTER XXVI

Theron spent half an hour in aimless strolling about the streets. From
earliest boyhood his mind had always worked most clearly when he