um of money, and you'll be
embittered and blighted for life. If you win, they and their pals will
have most of the estate; you will have little but the barren victory; and
you will have lost your mother. For, Arthur, if you try to prove that
your father was insane, and cut off his family in insane anger, you know
it will kill her."

A long silence; then Arthur moved toward the steps leading down to the
drive. "I'll think it over," he said, in a tone very different from any
he had used before.

Dory watched him depart with an expression of friendship and admiration.
"He's going to Judge Torrey," he said to himself. "Scratch that veneer of
his, and you find his mother and father."

The old judge received Arthur like a son, listened sympathetically as the
young man gave him in detail the interview with Dawson. Even as Arthur
recalled and related, he himself saw Dawson's duplicity; for, that past
master of craft had blundered into the commonest error of craft of all
degrees--he had underestimated the intelligence of the man he was trying
to cozen. He, rough in dress and manners and regarding "dudishness" as
unfailing proof of weak-mindedness, had set down the fashionable Arthur,
with his Harvard accent and his ignorance of affairs, as an unmitigated
ass. He had overlooked the excellent natural mind which false education
and foolish associations had tricked out in the motley, bells and bauble
of "culture"; and so, he had taken no pains to cozen artistically. Also,
as he thought greediness the strongest and hardiest passion in all human
beings, because it was so in himself, he had not the slightest fear that
anyone or anything could deflect his client from pursuing the fortune
which dangled, or seemed to dangle, tantalizingly near.

Arthur, recalling the whole interview, was accurate where he had been
visionary, intelligent where he had been dazed. He saw it all, before he
was half done; he did not need Torrey's ejaculated summary: "The
swindling scoundrel!" to confirm him.

"You signed the note?" said the judge.

"Yes," replied Arthur. He laughed with the frankness of self-derision
that augurs so well for a man's teachableness.

"He must have guessed," continued the judge, "that a contest is useless."

At that last word Arthur changed expression, changed color--or, rather,
lost all color. "Useless?" he repeated, so overwhelmed that he clean
forgot pride of appearances and let his feelings have full play in his
face.