Mrs. Billy halted; and Montague remarked, with a smile, that doubtless she was sorry now that she had done it.

“Oh, no,” she answered, with a shrug of her shoulders.  “I find that all I have to do is to be patient—­I hate people, and think I’d like to poison them, but if I only wait long enough, something happens to them much worse than I ever dreamed of.  You’ll be revenged on the Robbies some day.”

“I don’t want any revenge,” Montague answered.  “I’ve no quarrel with them—­I simply wish I hadn’t accepted their hospitality.  I didn’t know they were such little people.  It seems hard to believe it.”

Mrs. Billy laughed cynically.  “What could you expect?” she said.  “They know there’s nothing to them but their money.  When that’s gone, they’re gone—­they could never make any more.”

The lady gave a chuckle, and added:  “Those words make me think of Davy’s experience when he wanted to go to Congress!  Tell him about it, Davy.”

But Mr. Alden did not warm to the subject; he left the tale to his sister.

“He was a Democrat, you know,” said she, “and he went to the boss and told him he’d like to go to Congress.  The answer was that it would cost him forty thousand dollars, and he kicked at the price.  Others didn’t have to put up such sums, he said—­why should he?  And the old man growled at him, ’The rest have other things to give.  One can deliver the letter-carriers, another is paid for by a corporation.  But what can you do?  What is there to you but your money?’—­So Davy paid the money—­didn’t you, Davy?” And Davy grinned sheepishly.

“Even so,” she went on, “he came off better than poor Devon.  They got fifty thousand out of him, and sold him out, and he never got to Congress after all!  That was just before he concluded that America wasn’t a fit place for a gentleman to live in.”

—­And so Mrs. Billy got started on the Devons!  And after that came the Havens and the Wymans and the Todds—­it was midnight before she got through with them all.

CHAPTER XVIII

The newspapers said nothing more about the Hasbrook suit; but in financial circles Montague had attained considerable notoriety because of it.  And this was the means of bringing him a number of new cases.

But alas, there were no more fifty-thousand-dollar clients!  The first caller was a destitute widow with a deed which would have entitled her to the greater part of a large city in Pennsylvania—­only unfortunately the deed was about eighty years old.  And then there was a poor old man who had been hurt in a street-car accident and had been tricked into signing away his rights; and an indignant citizen who proposed to bring a hundred suits against the traction trust for transfers refused.  All were contingency cases, with the chances of success exceedingly remote.  And Montague noticed that the people had come to him as a last resort, having apparently heard of him as a man of altruistic temper.