help. I saw the quotation in the evening paper; and
I know, better, perhaps, than you do, the need for haste. Must you go
now?" She had taken his arm and was edging him through the press in the
parlors toward the entrance hall.

"_You_ haven't paid me yet," he objected.

"No; I'm trying to remember. Oh, yes; I have it now. Wasn't some one
telling me that you are interested in House Bill Twenty-nine?"

They had reached the dimly lighted front vestibule, and her hand was still
on his arm.

"I was interested in it," he admitted, correcting the present to the past
tense.

"But after it went to the House committee on judiciary you left it to more
skilful, or perhaps we'd better say, to less scrupulous hands?"

"I believe you are a witch. Is there anything you don't know?"

"Plenty of things. For example, I don't know exactly how much it cost our
good friends of the 'vested interests' to have that bill mislaid in the
committee room. But I do know they made a very foolish bargain."

"Beyond all doubt a most demoralizing bargain, which, to say the best of
it, was only a choice between two evils. But why foolish?"

"Because--well, because mislaid things have a way of turning up
unexpectedly, you know, and--"

He stopped her in a sudden gust of feverish excitement.

"Tell me what you mean in one word, Miss Van Brock. Don't those fellows
intend to stay bought?"

She smiled pityingly.

"You are very young, Mr. David--or very honest. Supposing those 'fellows',
as you dub the honorable members of the committee on judiciary, had a
little plan of their own; a plan suggested by the readiness of certain of
their opponents to rush into print with statements which might derange
things?"

"I am supposing it with all my might."

"That is right; we are only supposing, you must remember. We may suppose
their idea was to let the excitement about the amended bill die down; to
let people generally, and one fiercely honest young corporation attorney
in particular, have time to forget that there was such a thing as House
Bill Twenty-nine. And in such a suppositional case, how much they would be
surprised, and how they would laugh in their sleeves, if some one came
along and paid them handsomely for doing precisely what they meant to do."

David Kent's smile was almost ferocious.

"My argument is as good now as it was in the beginning: they have yet to
reckon with the man who will dare to expose them."

She turned from him and