She was not as enthusiastic as he thought she ought to be.  In the soil prepared for it by the political confidences of the winter there had grown up a many-branching tree of intimacy between these two; a frank, sexless friendship, as Kent would have described it, in which a man who was not very much given to free speech with any one unburdened himself, and the woman made him believe that her quick, apprehending sympathy was the one thing needful—­as women have done since the world began.

Since the looting of the railroad which had taken him out of the steadying grind of regular work, Kent had been the prey of mixed motives.  From the first he had thrown himself heartily into the problem of retrieval, but the pugnacious professional ambition to break the power of the machine had divided time pretty equally with sentiment.  Elinor had said little about the vise-nip of hardship which the stock-smashing would impose upon three unguardianed women; but Penelope had been less reticent.  Wanting bare justice at the hands of the wreckers, Elinor would go to her wedding with Ormsby as the beggar maid went to King Cophetua; and all the loyalty of an unselfish love rose up in Kent to make the fight with the grafters a personal duel.

At every step in the hitherto discouraging struggle Portia Van Brock had been his keen-sighted adviser, prompter, ally of proof.  He told himself now and again in a flush of gratitude that he was coming to owe her more than he had ever owed any woman; that where other men, more—­or less—­fortunate, were not denied the joy of possession, he, the disappointed one, was finding a true and loyal comradeship next best, if not quite equal to the beatitudes of passion.

In all of which David Kent was not entirely just to himself.  However much he owed to Portia—­and the debt was large—­she was not his only creditor.  Something he owed to the unsatisfied love; more, perhaps, to the good blood in his veins; but most of all to the battle itself.  For out of the soul-harrowings of endeavor was emerging a better man, a stronger man, than any his friends had known.  Brutal as their blind gropings were, the Flagellants of the Dark Ages plied their whips to some dim purpose.  Natures there be that rise only to the occasion; and if there be no occasion, no floggings of adversity or bone-wrenchings upon the rack of things denied, there will be no awakening—­no victory.

David Kent was suffering in both kinds, and was the better man for it.  From looking forward to success in the narrow field of professional advancement, or in the scarcely broader one of the righting of one woman’s financial wrongs, he was coming now to crave it in the name of manhood; to burn with an eager desire to see justice done for its own sake.

So, when he had come to Portia with the scheme of effacing Judge MacFarlane and his receiver at one shrewd blow, the first of the many plans which held out a fair promise of success as a reward for daring, he was disappointed at her lack of enthusiasm.