A white line above the forest was all that remained of the sunset when he rose up and took from his coat a silver locket and opened it and held it to the fading light.  Presently he closed it again, and walked slowly along the river bank toward the little city twinkling on its hill.  He crossed the hooded bridge and climbed the slope, stopping for a moment at a little stationery shop; he passed through the groups which were still loudly discussing this thing he had done, and gained his room and locked the door.  Men came to it and knocked and got no answer.  The room was in darkness, and the night breeze stirred among the trees in the park and blew in at the window.

At last Jethro got up and lighted the gas and paused at the centre table.  He was to violate more than one principle of his life that night, though not without a struggle; and he sat for a long while looking at the blank paper before him.  Then he wrote, and sealed the letter—­which contained three lines—­and pulled the bell cord.  The call was answered by a messenger who had been far many years in the service of the Pelican House, and who knew many secrets of the gods.  The man actually grew pale when he saw the address on the envelope which was put in his hand and read the denomination of the crisp note under it that was the price of silence.

“F-find the gentleman and give it to him yourself.  Er—­John?”

“Yes, Mr. Bass?”

“If you don’t find him, bring it—­back.”

When the man had gone, Jethro turned down the gas and went again to his chair by the window.  For a while voices came up to him from the street, but at length the groups dispersed, one by one; and a distant clock boomed out eleven solemn strokes.  Twice the clock struck again, at the half-hour and midnight, and the noises in the house—­the banging of doors and the jangling of keys and the hurrying of feet in the corridors—­were hushed.  Jethro took no thought of these or of time, and sat gazing at the stars in the depths of the sky above the capital dome until a shadow emerged from the black mass of the trees opposite and crossed the street.  In a few minutes there were footsteps in the corridor,—­stealthy footsteps—­and a knock on the door.  Jethro got up and opened it, and closed it again and locked it.  Then he turned up the gas.

“S-sit down,” he said, and nodded his head toward the chair by the table.

Isaac Worthington laid his silk hat on the table, and sat down.  He looked very haggard and worn in that light, very unlike the first citizen who had entered Brampton in triumph on his return from the West not many months before.  The long strain of a long fight, in which he had risked much for which he had labored a life to gain, had told on him, and there were crow’s-feet at the corners of, his eyes, and dark circles under them.  Isaac Worthington had never lost before, and to destroy the fruits of such a man’s ambition is to destroy the man.  He was not as young as he had once been.  But now, in the very hour of defeat, hope had rekindled the fire in the eyes and brought back the peculiar, tight-lipped, mocking smile to the mouth.  An hour ago, when he had been pacing Alexander Duncan’s library, the eyes and the mouth had been different.