“If I can do anything for you, let me know,” I told him.  He said nothing, he did not even smile.  At this moment he was opportunely joined by a man who had the appearance of a labour leader, and I walked away.  I was resentful; my mood, in brief, was that of a man who has done something foolish and is inclined to talk to himself aloud:  but the mood was complicated, made the more irritating by the paradoxical fact that that last look he had given me seemed to have borne the traces of affection....

It is perhaps needless to add that the court reversed its former decision.

XVI.

The Pilot published a series of sensational articles and editorials about the Galligan matter, a picture of Galligan, an account of the destitute state of his wife and family.  The time had not yet arrived when such newspapers dared to attack the probity of our courts, but a system of law that permitted such palpable injustice because of technicalities was bitterly denounced.  What chance had a poor man against such a moloch as the railroad, even with a lawyer of such ability as had been exhibited by Hermann Krebs?  Krebs was praised, and the attention of Mr. Lawler’s readers was called to the fact that Krebs was the man who, some years before, had opposed single-handed in the legislature the notorious Bill No. 709.  It was well known in certain circles—­the editorial went on to say—­that this legislation had been drawn by Theodore Watling in the interests of the Boyne Iron Works, etc., etc.  Hugh Paret had learned at the feet of an able master.  This first sight of my name thus opprobriously flung to the multitude gave me an unpleasant shock.  I had seen Mr. Scherer attacked, Mr. Gorse attacked, and Mr. Watling:  I had all along realized, vaguely, that my turn would come, and I thought myself to have acquired a compensating philosophy.  I threw the sheet into the waste basket, presently picked it out again and reread the sentence containing my name.  Well, there were certain penalties that every career must pay.  I had become, at last, a marked man, and I recognized the fact that this assault would be the forerunner of many.

I tried to derive some comfort and amusement from the thought of certain operations of mine that Mr. Lawler had not discovered, that would have been matters of peculiar interest to his innocent public:  certain extra-legal operations at the time when the Bovine corporation was being formed, for instance.  And how they would have licked their chops had they learned of that manoeuvre by which I had managed to have one of Mr. Scherer’s subsidiary companies in another state, with property and assets amounting to more than twenty millions, reorganized under the laws of New Jersey, and the pending case thus transferred to the Federal court, where we won hands down!  This Galligan affair was nothing to that.  Nevertheless, it was annoying.  As I sat in the street car on