“Ashley, I take it, is a man of some means?”

“Of comfortable means—­no more.  He has an entailed property in the Midlands and his pay.  As he has a mother and two sisters to pension off, Olivia begged to have no settlements made upon herself.  He wanted to do it, after the English fashion, but I think she showed good feeling in declining it.  Naturally, I approved of her doing it, knowing how many chances there were that I mightn’t be able to—­to play up—­myself.”

After this conversation Davenant could not but marvel at the ease with which their host passed the cigars again and urged him personally to have another glass of Chartreuse.  “Then suppose we join the ladies,” he added, when further hospitality was declined.

Guion took the time to fleck a few specks of cigar-ash from his shirt-bosom and waistcoat, thus allowing Rodney Temple to pass out first.  When alone with Davenant he laid his hand upon the younger man’s arm, detaining him.

“It was hardly fair to ask you to dinner,” he said, still forcing an unsteady smile, “and let you in for this.  I thought at first of putting you off; but in the end I decided to let you come.  To me it’s been a sort of dress-rehearsal—­a foretaste of what it’ll be in public.  The truth is, I’m a little jumpy.  The role’s so new to me that it means something to get an idea of how to play it on nerve.  I recall you as a little chap,” he added, in another tone, “when Tom Davenant and his wife first took you.  Got you out of an orphanage, didn’t they, or something like that?  If I remember rightly, your name was Hall or Hale—­”

“It was Hallett—­Peter Hallett.”

“Hallett, was it?  Well, it will do no harm for a young Caesar of finance like you to see what you may come to if you’re not careful.  Morituri te salutamus, as the gladiators used to say.  Only I wish it was to be the arena and the sword instead of the court-room and the Ride with Morrowby Jukes.”

Davenant said nothing, not because he had nothing to say, but because his thoughts were incoherent.  Perhaps what was most in the nature of a shock to him was the sight of a man whom he both admired for his personality and honored as a pillar of Boston life falling so tragically into ruin.  While it was true that to his financially gifted mind any misuse of trust funds had the special heinousness that horse-lifting has to a rancher, yet as he stood with Guion’s hand on his shoulder he knew that something in the depths of his being was stirred, and stirred violently, that had rarely been affected before.  He had once, as a boy, saved a woman from drowning; he had once seen a man at an upper window of a burning house turn back into the fire while the bystanders restrained him, Davenant, from attempting an impossible rescue.  Something of the same unreasoning impulse rose up within him now—­the impulse to save—­the kind of impulse that takes no account of the merit of the person in peril, seeing only the danger.