"No, I don't!" he protested. "I am as obstinate as a mule. Ask Ormsby, or Loring. But the logic of the thing is blankly unanswerable. I can either get down to the dirty level of these highbinders--fight the devil with a brand taken out of his own fire; or----" "Or what?" she asked. "Or think up some other scheme; some plan which doesn't involve a surrender on my part of common decency and self-respect." "Yes?" she retorted. "I suppose you have the other plan all wrought out and ready to drop into place?" "No, I haven't," he admitted reluctantly. "But at least you have some notion of what it is going to be?" "No." She was pacing back and forth in front of his chair in a way that was almost man-like; but her contemptuous impatience made her dangerously beautiful. Suddenly she stopped and turned upon him, and there were sharp claws in the kitten-buffetings. "Do you know you are spoiling a future that most men would hesitate to throw away?" she asked. "While you have been a man of one idea in this railroad affair, we haven't been idle--your newspaper and political friends, and Ormsby and I. You are ambitious; you want to succeed; and we have been laying the foundations for you. The next election would give you anything in the gift of the State that a man of your years could aspire to. Have you known this?" "I have guessed it," he said quite humbly. "Of course you have. But it has all been contingent upon one thing: you were to crush the grafters in this railroad struggle--show them up--and climb to distinction yourself on the ladder from which you had shaken them. It might have been done; it was in a fair way to be done. And now you turn back and leave the plow in the furrow!" There was more of a like quality--a good bit more; some of it regretful; all of it pungent and logical from Miss Van Brock's point of view; and Kent was no rock not to be moved by the small tempest of disappointed vicarious ambition. Wherefore he escaped when he could, though only to begin the ethical battle all over again; to fight and to wander among the tombs in the valley of indecision for a week and a day, eight miserable twirlings of the earth in space, during which interval he was invisible to his friends and innocuous to his enemies. On the morning of the ninth day Editor Hildreth telephoned Miss Van Brock to ask if she knew where Kent could be found. The answer was a rather anxious negative; though the query could have been answered affirmatively by the conductor and motorman of an early morning electric car which ran to the farthest outskirts of the eastern suburb of the city. Following a boyish habit he had never fully outgrown, Kent had once more taken his problem to the open, and the hour after luncheon time found him plodding wearily back to the end of the car line, jaded, dusty and stiff from much tramping of the brown plain, but with the long duel finally fought out to some despairing conclusion.