tinged with the same color—­his unimpeachable social position at Hoppy’s and later on at Harvard—­which he pronounced Haavaad—­and the profound respect in which he was held at the law school in Cambridge, that gave Mr. W. Montague Pepperill a certain confidence in the impeccability of himself, his family, his relatives, his friends, his college, his habiliments and haberdashery, his deportment, and his opinions, political, religious and otherwise.

For W.M.P. the only real Americans lived on Beacon Hill, though a few perhaps might be found accidentally across Charles Street upon the made land of the Back Bay.  A real American must necessarily also be a graduate of Harvard, a Unitarian, an allopath, belong to the Somerset Club and date back ancestrally at least to King Philip’s War.  W. Montague had, however, decided early in life that Boston was too small for him and that he owed a duty to the rest of the country.

So he had condescended to New York, where through his real American connections in law, finance and business he had landed a job in a political office where the aristocrats were all either Irish, Jews or Italians, who regarded him as an outlandish animal.  It had been a strange experience for him.  So had the discovery that graft, blackmail, corruption, vice and crime were not mere literary conventions, existing only for the theoretical purposes of novelists and playwrights, but were actualities frequently dealt with in metropolitan society.  He had secured his appointment from a reform administration and he had been retained as a holdover by Peckham, the new district attorney, by reason of the fact that his uncle by marriage was a Wall Street banker who contributed liberally without prejudice to both political parties.  This, however, W.M.P. did not know, and assumed that he was allowed to keep his four-thousand-dollar salary because the county could not get on without him.  He was slender, wore a mouse-colored waistcoat, fawn tie and spats, and plastered his hair neatly down on each side of a glossy cranium that was an almost perfect sphere.

“Ah!  Mr. William Montague Pepperill, I believe?” inquired Mr. Tutt with profound politeness from the doorway of W.M.P.’s cubicle, which looked into the gloomy light shaft of the Criminal Courts Building.

Mr. Pepperill finished what he was writing and then looked up.

“Yes,” he replied.  “What can I do for you?”

He did not ask Mr. Tutt his name or invite him to sit down.

The old lawyer smiled.  He liked young men, even conceited young men; they were so enthusiastic, so confident, so uncompromising.  Besides, W.M.P. was at heart, as Mr. Tutt perceived, a high-class sort of chap.  So he smiled.

“My name is Tutt,” said he.  “I am counsel for a man named Hassoun, whom you are going to try for murder.  You are, of course, perfectly familiar with the facts.”

He fumbled in his waistcoat, produced two withered stogies and cast his eye along the wall.