u know you are spoiling a future that most men would hesitate to
throw away?" she asked. "While you have been a man of one idea in this
railroad affair, we haven't been idle--your newspaper and political
friends, and Ormsby and I. You are ambitious; you want to succeed; and we
have been laying the foundations for you. The next election would give you
anything in the gift of the State that a man of your years could aspire
to. Have you known this?"

"I have guessed it," he said quite humbly.

"Of course you have. But it has all been contingent upon one thing: you
were to crush the grafters in this railroad struggle--show them up--and
climb to distinction yourself on the ladder from which you had shaken
them. It might have been done; it was in a fair way to be done. And now
you turn back and leave the plow in the furrow!"

There was more of a like quality--a good bit more; some of it regretful;
all of it pungent and logical from Miss Van Brock's point of view; and
Kent was no rock not to be moved by the small tempest of disappointed
vicarious ambition. Wherefore he escaped when he could, though only to
begin the ethical battle all over again; to fight and to wander among the
tombs in the valley of indecision for a week and a day, eight miserable
twirlings of the earth in space, during which interval he was invisible to
his friends and innocuous to his enemies.

On the morning of the ninth day Editor Hildreth telephoned Miss Van Brock
to ask if she knew where Kent could be found. The answer was a rather
anxious negative; though the query could have been answered affirmatively
by the conductor and motorman of an early morning electric car which ran
to the farthest outskirts of the eastern suburb of the city. Following a
boyish habit he had never fully outgrown, Kent had once more taken his
problem to the open, and the hour after luncheon time found him plodding
wearily back to the end of the car line, jaded, dusty and stiff from much
tramping of the brown plain, but with the long duel finally fought out to
some despairing conclusion.

The City Hall clock was upon the stroke of three when the inbound
trolley-car landed him in front of the Clarendon. It was a measure of his
purposeful abstraction that he went on around the corner to the Security
Bank, dusty and unpresentable as he was, and transferred the packet of
incriminating affidavits from the safety deposit box to his pocket before
going to his rooms in the hotel.