It was Ham’s time-honored custom to tease his aunt, and while she snorted and sniffed, she enjoyed it, for whatever she thought of a Babylonian life, she secretly worshiped this brilliant young nephew who so well fitted its stress and turmoil.

“Were you down-stairs at dinner tonight, flirting with the grand dukes and big-wigs?” he demanded as he kissed her pale cheek.

“As if you didn’t know,” she austerely rebuked, “that, when company comes, I always have supper right here in my own room.”

It would have been a surrender of principle for Hannah Burton to call “company” guests, or the evening meal “dinner.”

“There were some very smart people down-stairs, I’m told,” the man heckled with twinkling eyes.  “Divorcees in numbers and affinities galore.”

The old lady shuddered.

“Ham, I wish you wouldn’t run on in that ungodly fashion.  I’m sure it’s no laughing matter.  I pray for you day and night, but when a body’s blinded by wealth and imagining vain things they’re in mortal danger.”

Her nephew’s face softened.  “As long as you’re praying for me, Aunt Hannah,” he assured her, “I still have a fighting chance.”

“Ham,” she said suddenly with a shadow of deep anxiety in her eyes, “ain’t your father playing cards more than’s good for him?  I’ve worried considerable about that here of late.  He used to read his Scriptures regular.  Now he don’t do it.  Instead he gambles.”

“Father only plays in amiable little games, for the sake of charity, Aunt Hannah.”  Hamilton smiled indulgently as he enlightened her.  “You could hardly call it gambling.  In gambling there is an element of chance.  Father merely contributes.”

The old lady shook her head.  “This town ain’t much different from Tyre and Sidon and Babylon, so far as I can see,” she mournfully asserted.

“They were said to be live towns in their day,” he admitted.

Then for the rest of his spare hour he chatted with her and teased her solemnity into laughter, and before he left, because she asked it and complained that her eyes were poor, he read to her a chapter from the New Testament and kissed her good-night.  Ten minutes later he was in his own library and was directing that two gentlemen, whom he was expecting, be ushered there to talk business.

The two were alike only in that each had a versatile and executive brain.  One was elderly and stout, and, though two decades of established success had polished his original crudity into a certain dignity, there survived in his eyes the darting shiftiness of glance that had settled there in days when his one asset was an almost diabolical cleverness as a criminal lawyer.

An old trick of badgering witnesses with a brow-beating stare from half-closed lids clung unpleasantly to him, discounting his acquired distinction of bearing.  This was Isaac Ruferton, of the firm of Ruferton and Willow.  From criminal lawyer to corporation-scourge and from corporation-scourge to corporation counsel are logical stages of development.  From clients who need, and can pay for, a mind of unusual resource, as formerly from vagabond’s in police-court cages, he earned what he was paid.