“Yes, just that, Mr. Blount.  There is an appreciation which transcends the commonplace things of life, and I don’t know which is worthier of the greater admiration, your courage in coming to me, or your father’s single-heartedness in urging you to do it after he had learned the purport of these papers.  Yet this is what I should have expected of David Blount as I know him.  Men say of him that he has sometimes wielded his tremendous political power regardless of the law and of other men’s rights.  But in the field of pure ethics, in the exercise of the high and holy duty which is laid upon the man who has become a father, I should look to find your father doing precisely what he has done.  I assure you that it is not without reason that many of his fellow citizens call him most affectionately the ‘Honorable Senator Sage-Brush.’”

“But the consequences!” gasped the unwilling informer.  “His name in those affidavits!”

The chief justice was nodding slowly.

“Without doubt a great crime has been committed, and a still greater one is contemplated.  We shall take prompt action to defeat the contemplated crime at the polls next Tuesday, rest assured of that.  But at the same time, let me say a word for your comfort:  these papers came to you from the hands of a criminal, and that particular criminal had—­as I am well informed—­every reason to be vindictively enraged against your father.  I am sure you are too good a lawyer to fail to see the point.  If this man Gryson, in ‘getting even,’ as he expressed it to you, has added perjury to his other crimes—­But we need not follow the suggestion any further at this time.  Be hopeful, Mr. Blount, as I am.  Leave these matters with me, and go and be as good a son as he deserves to my old friend David.”

Evan Blount left the venerable presence in the judges’ chambers of the Capitol with a heart strangely mellowed, and with a feeling of relief too great to be measured.  At last, without compromise, and equally without the slightest concession to the natural human passion for vindication, the momentous step had been taken.  Whatever might come of it, there would be no daggerings from an outraged conscience, no remorse for an unworthy passion impulsively yielded to.  Also, with the rolling of the terrible burden to other and entirely competent shoulders there came a sense of freedom that was almost jubilant; and under the promptings of this new light-heartedness he was able to make a reasonably cheerful fourth at the cafe dinner-table a little later.

Oddly enough, as he thought, Patricia was also cheerful, though she vanished with Mrs. Honoria to the private suite shortly after the adjournment to the mezzanine lounge.  Past this, after the father and son had smoked their cigars in man-like silence for a time, Mrs. Honoria, coated and hatted as if to go out, came back to sit near the balustrade, looking down upon the kindling lobby activities.  Shortly after her coming the senator rose to go.  Instantly his wife sprang up to walk with him to the head of the great stair.