It was three weeks and more after Governor Marston’s call summoning the Assembly for an investigative session.  Kent had fought his way triumphantly through the special election to a seat in the House, aided and abetted manfully by Ormsby, Hildreth, and the entire Trans-Western influence and vote.  And now men were beginning to say that without the tireless blows of the keen-witted, sharp-tongued young corporation lawyer, the junto might still have reasserted itself.

But the House committee, of which Kent was the youngest member and the chairman, had proved incorruptible, and the day of the Gaston wolf-pack was over.  Hendricks resigned, to escape a worse thing; Meigs came over to the majority with a show of heartiness that made Kent doubly watchful of him; heads fell to the right and left, until at the last there was left only one member of the original cabal to reckon with; the judicial tool of the capitol ring.

Kent had hesitated when MacFarlane’s name came up; and the judge never knew that he owed his escape from the inquisitorial House committee, and his permission to resign on the plea of broken health, to a young woman whom he had never seen.

It was Elinor Brentwood who was his intercessor; and the occasion was the last day of the third week of the extra session—­a Saturday afternoon and a legislative recess when Kent had borrowed Ormsby’s auto-car, and had driven Elinor and Penelope out to Pentland Place to look at a house he was thinking of buying.  For with means to indulge it, Kent’s Gaston-bred mania for plunging in real estate had returned upon him with all the acuteness of a half-satisfied passion.

They had gone all over the house and grounds with the caretaker, and when there was nothing more to see, Penelope had prevailed on the woman to open the Venetians in the music-room.  There was a grand piano in the place of honor, presided over by a mechanical piano-player; and Penelope went into ecstasies of mockery.

“Wait till I can find the music scrolls, and I’ll hypnotize you,” she said gleefully; and Kent and Elinor beat a hasty retreat to the wide entrance hall.

“I don’t quite understand it,” was Elinor’s comment, when they had put distance between themselves and Penelope’s joyous grinding-out of a Wagner scroll.  “It looks as if the owners had just walked out at a moment’s notice.”

“They did,” said Kent.  “They went to Europe, I believe.  And by the way; I think I have a souvenir here somewhere.  Will you go up to the first landing of the stair and point your finger at that window?”

She did it, wondering; and when he had the line of direction he knelt in the cushioned window-seat and began to probe with the blade of his pen-knife in a small round hole in the woodwork.

“What is it?” she asked, coming down to stand beside him.

“This.”  He had cut out a flattened bullet and was holding it up for her to see.  “It was meant for me, and I’ve always had an idea that I heard it strike the woodwork.”