As Dawson had suggested, Melville Sponley had a strong preference for truth and fair dealing whenever they were practicable; but it will not be imagined that in the course of a quarter century of commercial privateering he had not many times committed acts as irregular and as immoral--I am not speaking of commercial morality--as this attempt to wreck Bagsbury’s bank. He had concealed none of these things from her, and she had heard of them and taken her part in them with such entire equanimity that he had quite naturally been surprised at her outburst when she had first learned of his putting Curtin in the bank as a spy upon John. Harriet looked upon life from a thoroughly unmoral point of view. Of abstract right and wrong she had little conception. So long as Sponley’s operations were directed against men she did not know, except as her husband’s opponents, she never applied the criterion of fair play. But all that was changed as soon as John Bagsbury was concerned in the fighting. She regarded him almost as a brother, her loyalty to him was only less than her loyalty to her husband, and the mere suspicion of what Sponley had been doing that afternoon, of the meaning of his talk with Hauxton and of his two telephone messages, was intolerable. About an hour after Sponley went out, the butler knocked at her door. “Mr. Curtin is here,” he said, “to see Mr. Sponley. He says it is important and wishes to know when Mr. Sponley will be back.” Harriet said that she knew nothing about it, but presently the man returned, saying that Mr. Curtin wished to see her. She asked to be excused, but Curtin was persistent, and once more the butler came back, this time with a message. “He says, will you please tell Mr. Sponley when he comes in that Mr. Curtin has seen Mr. Hauxton and is sure he has started him off on the right track.” “I will take no message,” said Harriet, impatiently. “If Mr. Curtin wishes to leave any word for Mr. Sponley, he may write a note. Don’t come back again, whatever Mr. Curtin says.” But though the servant obeyed her, Harriet could not banish Curtin from her thoughts. She had always hated him, even before he had given her cause. His covert admiration was almost nauseating, and his miserable makeshift excuses for seeking her company when he knew that she could barely tolerate him exasperated her. She recalled with disgust the evening when he had forced himself into their dining room, and she wondered that his accusation of her husband had affected her as it did; she wished now that Sponley had sent him to prison. His message, though she had declined to receive it, and though she tried not to think of it, went over and over in her thoughts, and in spite of herself she wondered what it meant. What could “the right track” mean except the suspicion that the bank was in trouble? Why should her husband wish Hauxton to entertain that suspicion unless he was deliberately planning to ruin John Bagsbury? If he were--