“But now you are questioning it?  What would happen if you should tell what you know?”

“Chaos,” he replied briefly.

“May I ask who is implicated?”

“A good half of the corporation officials in the State, and some few outside of it.”

“Mercy!” she said again.  And then:  “It’s too big for me, Evan.  I can only go back to first principles and ask if it is ever justifiable to do evil that good may come.”

“If you put it that way, I’ve made myself particeps criminis,” he said gravely.  “I have given my word to keep still if the lawbreaking deals are broken off at once and in good faith.  Beyond that, I can’t help knowing that the exposure which I have threatened to make, and could make, would practically turn the people of this State into a mob.”

She was shaking her head determinedly.  “I can’t help you this time, Evan; truly I can’t.”  Then, in sudden appeal:  “Why won’t you go to your father?  He could tell you what to do and how to do it, and his judgment would be too big and just to stumble over the tangling little moralities.”

Blount smiled.

“What if I should tell you that my father is more or less involved, Patricia?  I don’t know precisely how much or how little, but I am assured, by those who claim to know, that he, too, would go down in the general wreck.”

“I can’t believe it!” she protested, in generous loyalty.  “These people, whoever they are, are deceiving you to shelter themselves.  Have you ever spoken to your father about this?”

“Yes, once; one evening when we were dining together I told him what I had, and what use I should make of it if all other means should fail.  Also, I advised him to dodge.”

“What did he say?”

“That is the discouraging part of it.  I was hoping against hope that he would tell me to go ahead; that he would say that he wasn’t involved.  But, as a matter of fact, he didn’t say much of anything.  I’m horribly afraid that his silence meant all that I’ve been trying to believe it didn’t mean.”

She was slowly opening and closing her fan, as if she were trying to gain time.

“I can only tell you again what I told you at first,” she said at length.  “You must be bigger than all these hampering circumstances; bigger than the little moralities, if need be.  You can be, Evan; you’ve given splendid proof of it thus far, and I’m proud—­just as proud as I can be—­”

Blount felt as if he could, joyously and entirely without scruple, have brained young Gordon, to whom the next dance belonged, and who came just at this climaxing moment to claim Patricia.  But there was no help for it, short of a cold-blooded and rather embarrassing deed of violence, and the hard-won confidence ended pretty much where it had begun.

When he left the Gordon house, which was far out in the northeastern residence suburb, Blount meant to go directly to the hotel and to bed.  He had been losing much sleep in the activities of the campaign, and the loss was beginning to tell upon him.  But as the trolley-car was passing the Temple Court Building he made sure that he saw a dim light illuminating the windows of his upper-floor office.  With all his suspicions of the morning reawakened, he dropped from the car, dashed into the building, and took the all-night elevator for his office floor.