“That isn’t the packet I gave you,” said Blount curtly.

The clerk looked away.  “You meant those letters, didn’t you?” he queried.  “The rubber band broke and I put them in an envelope.”

“When?” snapped Blount.

The young man faced around again and the innocence in his look disarmed the questioner.

“When?  Just now.  That’s what made me so long—­I couldn’t find an envelope big enough.”

Blount took up the letter opener and slipped the blade under the flap of the envelope.  If he had looked up at the stenographer then he would have seen the mask of innocence slip aside to discover a face ashen with terror.  But whatever the shorthand man had to fear from the opening of the lately sealed envelope was postponed by the incoming of Ackerton, the working head of the legal department, with a damage suit to discuss with his chief.  Blount thrust the big envelope into his pocket unopened, and later in the day, when he went around to his bank to put the evidence letters into his safe-deposit box, the incident of the morning had lost its significance so completely, or had been so deeply buried under other and more important matters, that he deposited the packet without examining it.

The evening of this same day there was a dance given by the Gordons in the ranchman candidate’s big house opposite the Weatherfords’ in Mesa Circle, and Blount went, hoping that Patricia would be there.  She was there; and in the heart of the evening, when Blount had persuaded her to sit out a dance with him in a corner of the homelike reception-hall, he began to pry at a little stone of stumbling which was threatening to grow too large to be easily rolled aside.

“I’m hunting a conscience to-night,” he said, without preface.  “Have you got one that you could lend me?”

She laughed lightly.

“You told me once that I had the New England conscience—­which was the same as saying that I had enough for my own needs and a surplus to pass around among my friends.  What bad thing have you been doing now?”

He made a wry face.  “It’s the ‘practical politics’ again.  Suppose I say that I have obtained positive evidence of a crime against the laws of the State and the nation.  How far am I justified in suppressing, for a perfectly right and proper end, this evidence which would send a lot of people to jail?”

“Mercy!” she exclaimed; “how you can bring a thunderbolt crashing down out of a perfectly clear sky!  Is it ever justifiable to shield criminals and criminality?”

“That is just what I’m trying to find out,” he persisted.  “At the present moment I am shielding a good handful of open lawbreakers.  Some of them know what I’m doing, and some of them don’t.  Those who know have been told that they must be good or I’ll publish the evidence, and they’ve promised to be good if I won’t publish it.  At the time I didn’t question my right to make such a bargain, but—­”