rtunate Angelo were the victims. A
few words from the old lawyer and she began to feel more confidence,
however. No one, in fact, could help but realize at first glance Mr.
Tutt's warmth of heart. The lines of his sunken cheeks if left to
themselves automatically tended to draw together into a whimsical smile,
and it required a positive act of will upon his part to adopt the stern
and relentless look with which he was wont to glower down upon some
unfortunate witness in cross-examination.

Inside Mr. Tutt was a benign and rather mellow old fellow, with a dry
sense of humor and a very keen knowledge of his fellow men. He made a
good deal of money, but not having any wife or child upon which to
lavish it he spent it all either on books or surreptitiously in quixotic
gifts to friends or strangers whom he either secretly admired or whom he
believed to be in need of money. There were vague traditions in the
office of presents of bizarre and quite impossible clothes made to
office boys and stenographers; of ex-convicts reoutfitted and sent
rejoicing to foreign parts; of tramps gorged to repletion and then
pumped dry of their adventures in Mr. Tutt's comfortable, dingy old
library; of a fur coat suddenly clapped upon the rounded shoulders of
old Scraggs, the antiquated scrivener in the accountant's cage in the
outer office, whose alcoholic career, his employer alleged, was marked
by a trail of empty rum kegs, each one flying the white flag of
surrender.

And yet old Ephraim Tutt could on occasion be cold as chiseled steel,
and as hard. Any appeal from a child, a woman or an outcast always met
with his ready response; but for the rich, successful and those in power
he seemed to entertain a deep and enduring grudge. He would burn the
midnight oil with equal zest to block a crooked deal on the part of a
wealthy corporation or to devise a means to extricate some no less
crooked rascal from the clutches of the law, provided that the rascal
seemed the victim of hard luck, inheritance or environment. His
weather-beaten conscience was as elastic as his heart. Indeed when under
the expansive influence of a sufficient quantity of malt extract or
ancient brandy from the cellaret on his library desk he had sometimes
been heard to enunciate the theory that there was very little difference
between the people in jail and those who were not.

He would work weeks without compensation to argue the case of some
guilty rogue before the Court o