The only fly in the ointment was the fact that O’Connell had walked into the district attorney’s office as soon as the rumor reached him and quietly submitted to being arrested, saying merely:  “I heard you wanted me.  Well, here I am!”

But though they badgered him for hours, lured him by every pretext to confess, put a stool pigeon in the same cell with him, and resorted to every trick, device and expedient known to the prosecutor’s office to trap him into some sort of an admission, they got nothing for their pains.  It was just one of those cases where the evidence simply wasn’t forthcoming.  And yet Peckham was aware that unless he convicted O’Connell his name would indeed be mud—­or worse.  This story, however, is concerned less with the family honor of the O’Connells than with that of the Beekmans.

Miss Althea was the last surviving member of her branch of the family.  Though she would probably have regarded it as slightly vulgar to have been referred to as “one hundred per cent American” she was so nearly so—­except for a reminiscent affection for “the late dear Queen”—­that the phrase in her case would have been substantially correct.  Her mother had been the daughter of a distinguished Revolutionary statesman who had been a signer of the Declaration of Independence, an ambassador and justice of the Supreme Court as well; her father a celebrated newspaper editor.

She had been born in the Prue and I period in Gramercy Park near what is now The Players’ Club, and the old colonial house with its white trimmings and ornamental ironwork had been the scene of many a modest gayety at a time when Emerson, Lowell, and George William Curtis were viewed less as citizens than as high priests of Culture, sharing equally in sanctity with the goddess thereof.  She could just remember those benign old gentlemen, as well as the many veterans of the Civil War who dined at her father’s decorous mahogany and talked of the preservation of the Constitution and those other institutions to found which it is generally assumed the first settlers landed on the Atlantic seaboard and self-sacrificingly accepted real estate from the wily native in return for whisky and glass beads.  She was forty-seven years of age, a Colonial Dame, a Daughter of the American Revolution, a member of the board of directors of several charitable institutions, and she was worth a couple of million dollars in railroad securities.  On Sundays she always attended the church in Stuyvesant Square frequented by her family, and as late as 1907 did so in the famous Beekman C-spring victoria driven by an aged negro coachman.

But besides being full of rectitude and good works—­which of themselves so often fail of attraction—­Miss Althea was possessed of a face so charming even in its slightly faded prettiness that one wondered how it was possible that she could successfully have withstood the suitors who must have crowded about her.  Her house on Fifth Avenue was full of old engravings of American patriots, and the library inherited from her editorial parent was replete with volumes upon subjects which would have filled a Bolshevik with disgust.  Briefly, if ever Trotzky had become Commissar of the Soviet of Manhattan, Miss Althea and those like her would have been the first candidates for a drumhead court-martial.