“Does Miss Brentwood know?”

“She knows nothing at all.  I was unwilling to entangle her, even with a confidence.”

“The more fool you,” said Loring, bluntly.  “You call yourself a lawyer, and you have not yet learned one of the first principles of common justice, which is that a woman has some rights which even a besotted lover is bound to respect.  You made love to her that summer at Croydon; you needn’t deny it.  And at the end of things you walk off to make your fortune without committing yourself; without knowing, or apparently caring, what your stiff-necked poverty-pride may cost her in years of uncertainty.  You deserve to lose her.”

Kent’s smile was a fair measure of his unhopeful mood.

“You can’t well lose what you have never had.  I’m not such an ass as to believe that she cared greatly.”

“How do you know?  Not by anything you ever gave her a chance to say, I’ll dare swear.  I’ve a bit of qualified good news for you, but the spirit is moving me mightily to hold my tongue.”

“Tell me,” said Kent, his indifference vanishing in the turning of a leaf.

“Well, to begin with, Miss Brentwood is still unmarried, though the gossips say she doesn’t lack plenty of eligible offers.”

“Half of that I knew; the other half I took for granted.  Go on.”

“Her mother, under the advice of the chief of the clan Brentwood, has been making a lot of bad investments for herself and her two daughters:  in other words, she has been making ducks and drakes of the Brentwood fortune.”

Kent was as deeply moved as if the loss had been his own, and said as much, craving more of the particulars.

“I can’t give them.  But I may say that the blame lies at your door, David.”

“At my door?  How do you arrive at that?”

“By the shortest possible route.  If you had done your duty by Elinor in the Croydon summer, Mrs. Brentwood would have had a bright young attorney for a son-in-law and adviser, and the bad investments would not have been made.”

Kent’s laugh was entirely devoid of mirth.

“Don’t trample on a man when he’s down.  I was neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet.  But how bad is the smash?  Surely you know that?”

“No, I don’t.  Bradford was telling me about it the day I left Boston.  He gave me to understand that the principal family holding at present is in the stock of a certain western railway.”

“Did he happen to know the name of the stock?” asked Kent, moistening his lips.

“He did.  Fate flirts with you two in the usual fashion.  Mrs. Brentwood’s little fortune—­and by consequence, Elinor’s and Penelope’s—­is tied up in the stock of the company whose platform we are occupying at the present moment—­the Western Pacific.”

Kent let slip a hard word directed at ill-advisers in general, and Loring took his cue from the malediction.

“You swear pretty feelingly, David.  Isn’t our property as good a thing as we of the Boston end have been cracking it up to be?”