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.

This paper weapon was the centering point of the struggle which had now lasted for nearly a fortnight.  So long as the weapon was his to use or to cast away, the outcome of the moral conflict hung in the balance.  But now he was emerging from the night wanderings among the tombs of the undecided.

“I can’t give it up; there is too much at stake,” he muttered, as he trudged heavily back to the hotel.  And before he went above stairs he asked the young woman at the house telephone exchange to ascertain if Governor Bucks were in his office at the capitol, and if so, if he were likely to remain there for an hour.

When he reached his rooms he flung the packet of papers on the writing-table and went to freshen himself with a bath.  That which lay before him called for fitness, mental and physical, and cool sanity.  In other times of stress, as just before a critical hour in court, the tub and the cold plunge had been his fillip where other men resorted to the bottle.

He was struggling into clean linen, and the packet was still lying where he had tossed it on entering, when a bell-boy came up with a card.  Kent read the name with a ghost of a smile relaxing the care-drawn lines about his mouth.  There are times when a man’s fate rushes to meet him, and he had fallen upon one of them.