“Good legal phrase, is n’t it? Oh, I understand your errand perfectly. Aunt Edie wrote me that there was a ‘condition’ to the legacy that I would n’t fulfill. If you’d come out here and found me all swathed up in black like a mummy, and with a funereal gulp in my voice when I spoke of my dear old Auntie, and the general manners of an undertaker right on the job, I expect it might have been worth twenty or twenty-five thousand dollars to me. Even a mourning band on my coat and a few appropriate sighs in the right place might have got me five or ten thousand. Maybe if I’d stopped to figure it out, I’d have dressed the part. A fellow will do a good deal for money. Then again, maybe I would n’t.” The memory of Marcia’s frank and lustrous eyes checked him. Could he have met their challenge, with the black badge of hypocrisy on him? “No! I’m damned if I would!” he declared with profound sincerity. “So there you have it. I know where I get off, and I don’t much care, to tell the truth. I lose.” The overweighted legal victim of responsibilities almost too heavy to be borne, slowly and accurately gathered up his hat, his gloves, his cane, his portfolio, and his eye-glasses in the absorbed manner of one taking an inventory. He bowed a solemn and professional farewell to Mr. Robson. At the door he paused. A gleam as of some faint, inward flickering of the eternal human which must at times assert itself even through the cerements of legal procedure, appeared upon his pink and careworn features. “No,” he pronounced profoundly. “You win.” CHAPTER IX WHAT ’s the matter with you, Robson?” Young Jeremy Robson turned a lack-luster eye upon Wackley, his managing editor. “Nothing,” he said listlessly. “You’re not looking well.” “Oh, I’m all right,” said the reporter, dully wishing his solicitous superior at the devil. “Want a few days off to go fishin’?” “No, thanks.” “What do you want?” inquired Wackley, dreading to hear that a raise of pay was the requisite. Cheered by the valuable reporter’s negative declaration of content with his lot as it was, the editor continued: “A sick owl is a merry wag to what you’ve been for the last ten days. All the ginger has gone out of your stuff. Can’t you dig us up something more as good as your Eli Wade story?” In that moment Jeremy Robson savored the sensations of the chicken-killing puppy when, awaking from blessedly forgetful reverie, it finds the dismal and penal relic of its crime still fast about its neck. “Look here,” pursued Wackley. “This is n’t going to do. You quit for the day, and go home. To-morrow there’s going to be doings in the Senate. Martin Embree is going to spring something. You cover it. We’ll want a good story, if the stuff comes through. Beat it for home, now!”