ughts of his father. The shattered bits of recollection of
him that he had preserved had formed a mosaic which had pictured the
hero of his boyhood. Yet his father's name would now go down, linked
not to success and achievement, but to failure, to chicanery, to the
robbing of the poor. The thought had become a blind ache that had
tortured him. Beneath the old characteristic veneer it had been working
a strange change. Something old had been dying, something new budding
under the careless exterior of the man who now faced his examiner in the
big armchair that May afternoon.

John Valiant's testimony, to those of his listeners who cherished a
sordid disbelief in the ingenuousness of the man who counts his wealth
in seven figures, seemed a pose of gratuitous insolence. It had a
clarity and simplicity that was almost horrifying. He did not stoop to
gloze his own monumental flippancy. He had attended only one directors'
meeting during that year. Till after the crash, he had known little, had
cared less, about the larger investments of the Corporation's capital:
he had left all that to others.

Perhaps to the examiner himself this blunt directness--the bitter
unshadowed truth that searched for no evasions--had appeared effrontery;
the contemptuous and cynical frankness of the young egoist who sat
secure, his own millions safe, on the ruins of the enterprise from
which they were derived. The questions, that had been bland with suave
innuendo, acquired an acrid sarcasm, a barbed and stinging satire, which
at length touched indiscretion. He allowed himself a scornful reference
to the elder Valiant as scathing as it was unjustified.

To the man in the witness-chair this had been like an electric shock.
Something new and unguessed beneath the husk of boredom, the indolent
pose of body, had suddenly looked from his blazing eyes: something
foreign to Vanity Valiant, the club habitue, the spoiled scion of
wealth. For a brief five minutes he spoke, in a fashion that surprised
the court room--a passionate defense of his father, the principles on
which the Corporation had been founded and its traditional policies: few
sentences, but each hot as lava and quivering with feeling. Their very
force startled the reporters' bench and left his inquisitor for a moment
silent.

The latter took refuge in a sardonic reference to the Corporation's
salary-list. Did the witness conceive, he asked with effective
deliberation, that he had rendered s