Gorham snapped his fingers. "I don't care! I don't intend to leave that little boy to languish in jail for months, for a year perhaps, till his trial comes off. I tell you the idea of doing this little good turn freshens me all over. I feel as if I had been on a big drunk and somehow got a gourd of cold water from a little spring under a hillside, where I used to stop to drink when I was a boy driving the cows from the pasture. I _have_ been drunk,--on artificiality, and worldliness, and selfishness." "But," remonstrated the broker. Then he paused. "But what, man?" exclaimed Gorham impatiently. The broker went red and was silent. Indeed, how could he find words to suggest seriously to a man of unblemished integrity that by this act of charity, as for mitigating circumstances men from sheer motives of humanity sometimes refuse to prosecute, he might compromise himself. He might be suspected of having connived at the burning of the theatre for the sake of the insurance money and then having secretly furnished bail for the captured accomplice for fear that the boy, if left in prison, would reveal and incriminate his principal. "Oh, surely, surely,--no one could ever imagine such an absurdity!" thought Vanbigh, deeming this but a bit of over alert and captious caution. Gorham was beginning to show unmistakable signs of anger, even offense. Yet he was only the more determined. "Jim," he said in a different tone, "you and all your family have always protested yourselves under great obligations to me." He paused as if for a reply. "You know what we feel for you!" Vanbigh replied warmly. He lifted earnest eyes as he spoke. For Gorham had been a schoolfellow of Vanbigh's elder brother, and although later in life they had drifted apart in point of association, there had always been that affectionate tie of old reminiscence between them. Only some two or three years earlier than the present they had chanced to meet in New Orleans, where they were lingering still at the time of the outbreak of one of the terrible pestilences of yellow fever. Gorham, when his friend succumbed, one of the first cases, nursed him like a brother, would not leave him, although he could then have escaped in the general panic-stricken exodus, never left him, indeed, for an instant, and after his death, being detained by the quarantine, contracted the infection and came very near death himself, alone and among strangers. People said that it was a mere impulse of Gorham's,--but the relatives of his friend felt and expressed great gratitude. He himself had never before mentioned it. "I know what you all _said_," he remarked significantly. "I never doubted it before." He would have paid "good money" to an actor who could command a tone of so subtle an inflection as to make such a hit as that! The broker rose and put on his hat. "I shall not let you doubt it again!" he protested. "You are a good fellow, Jim!" cried Gorham, with great satisfaction in carrying his point.