“You must have dived deep.  They went a week ago Tuesday, and you lost your ghostly adviser and your political stage manager at one fell swoop.  But it isn’t wonderful that you haven’t missed Mr. Ormsby.  Having elected Miss Brentwood your conscience-keeper-in-chief, you have no further use for the P.S.M.”

“And you have no further use for me, apparently,” he complained.  “Did you send for me so that you might abuse me in the second edition?”

“No; I wanted to give you a bit of news, and to repeat an old question of mine.  Do you know what they are going to do next with your railroad?”

“Yes; Hildreth told me this afternoon.”

“Well, what are you going to do?”

“Nothing.  There is nothing to be done.  They have held to the form of legal procedure thus far, but they won’t do it any more.  They will take MacFarlane off in a corner somewhere, have him make Guilford permanent receiver, and the lease to the Overland will be consummated on the spot.  I sha’n’t be in it.”

“Probably not; certainly not if you don’t try to get in it.  And that brings me back to the old question.  Are you big enough, David?”

“If you think I haven’t been big enough to live up to my opportunities thus far, I’m afraid I may disappoint you again,” he said doubtfully.

“You have disappointed me,” she admitted.  “That is why I am asking:  I’d like to be reasonably sure your Jonathan Edwardsy notions are not going to trip us again.”

“Portia, if I thought you really meant that ...  A conscienceless man is bad enough, God knows; but a conscienceless woman——­”

Her laugh was a decorous little shriek.

“David, you are not big; you are narrow, narrow, narrow!  Is there then no other code of morals in the round world save that which the accident of birth has interleaved with your New England Bible?  What is conscience?  Is it an absolute standard of right and wrong?  Or is it merely your ideal or mine, or Shafiz Ullah Khan’s?”

“You may call it all the hard names you can lay tongue to,” he allowed.  “I’m not getting much comfort out of it, and I rather enjoy hearing it abused.  But you are thrusting at a shadow in the present instance.  Do you know what I did this afternoon?”

“How should I know?”

“I don’t know why you shouldn’t:  you know everything that happens.  But I’ll tell you.  I had been fighting the thing over from start to finish and back again ever since you blessed me out a week ago last Monday, and at the wind-up this afternoon I took the papers out of the bank vault, having it in mind to go and give his Excellency a bad quarter of an hour.”

“But you didn’t do it?”

“No, he saved me the trouble.  While I was getting ready to go and hunt him, his card came up.  We had it out in my rooms.”

“I’m listening,” she said; and he rehearsed the-facts for her, concealing nothing.