ring.

"They might have told us what they were going to do."

Everett Constable eyed him.

"Would it have made any difference, Plimpton?" he demanded.

After that they rode in silence, until they came to a certain West End
corner, where they both descended. Little Mr. Constable's sensations
were, if anything, less enviable, and he had not Mr. Plimpton's
recuperative powers. He had sold that night, for a mess of pottage,
the friendship and respect of three generations. And he had fought,
for pay, against his own people.

And lastly, there was Langmaid, whose feelings almost defy analysis. He
chose to walk through the still night the four miles--that separated him
from his home. And he went back over the years of his life until he
found, in the rubbish of the past, a forgotten and tarnished jewel. The
discovery pained him. For that jewel was the ideal he had carried away,
as a youth, from the old law school at the bottom of Hamilton Place,
--a gift from no less a man than the great lawyer and public-spirited
citizen, Judge Henry Goodrich--Philip Goodrich's grandfather, whose
seated statue marked the entrance of the library. He, Nelson Langmaid,
--had gone forth from that school resolved to follow in the footsteps
of that man,--but somehow he missed the path. Somehow the jewel had lost
its fire. There had come a tempting offer, and a struggle--just one:
a readjustment on the plea that the world had changed since the days of
Judge Goodrich, whose uncompromising figure had begun to fade: an
exciting discovery that he, Nelson Langmaid, possessed the gift of
drawing up agreements which had the faculty of passing magically through
the meshes of the Statutes. Affluence had followed, and fame, and even
that high office which the Judge himself had held, the Presidency of the
State Bar Association. In all that time, one remark, which he had tried
to forget, had cut him to the quick. Bedloe Hubbell had said on the
political platform that Langmaid got one hundred thousand dollars a year
for keeping Eldon Parr out of jail.

Once he stopped in the street, his mind suddenly going back to the action
of the financier at the vestry meeting.

"Confound him!" he said aloud, "he has been a fool for once. I told him
not to do it."

He stood at last in the ample vestibule of his house, singling out his
latch-key, when suddenly the door opened, and his daughter Helen
appeared.

"Oh, dad," she cried, "why are you so-late? I've been wa