“No doubt. Wendover and Tenney were smart enough to put the credulous youngster in the very forefront of everything. Until these affidavits came to hand to-day, it would have been far easier to convict him than them.” “Precisely,” urged Kate. “Credulous is just the word. He was weak, foolish, vain--whatever you like. They led him into the thing. But I don’t believe that at the outset, or, indeed, till very recently, he had any idea of being a party to a plan to plunder us. There are reasons,” the girl blushed a little, and hesitated, “to be frank, there are reasons for my thinking so.” Reuben, noting the faint flush of embarrassment, catching the doubtful inflection of the words, felt that he comprehended everything, and mirrored that feeling in his glance. “I quite follow you,” he said. “It is my notion that he was deceived, at the beginning.” “Others deceived him, and still more he deceived himself,” responded Kate. “And that is why,” put in Ethel, “we feel like asking you not to take the matter into the courts--I mean so as to put him in prison. It would be too dreadful to think of--to take a man who had dined at your house, and been boating with you, and had driven with you all over the Orange Mountains, picking wild-flowers for you and all that, and put him into prison, where he would have his hair shaved off, and tramp up and down on a treadmill. No; we mustn’t do that, Mr. Tracy.” Kate added musingly: “He has lost so much, we can afford to be generous, can we not?” Then Reuben felt that there could be no answer possible except “yes.” His heart pleaded with his brain for a lover’s interpretation of this speech; and his tongue, to evade the issue, framed some halting words about allowing him to go over the whole case to-morrow, and postponing a final decision until that had been done. The consent of silence was accorded to this, and everybody at the table knew that there would be no prosecutions. Upon the instant the atmosphere grew lighter. “And now for the real thing,” said Kate, gayly. “I am commissioned on behalf of the entire family to formally thank you for coming to our rescue tonight. Mamma did not hear your speech--she resolutely sat in the library, pretending to read, during the whole rumpus, and we were in such a hurry to get up-stairs that we didn’t tell her when you began--but she couldn’t help hearing the horns, and she is as much obliged to you as we are; and that is very, very, very much indeed!” “Yes, indeed,” assented Mrs. Minster. “I don’t know where the police were, at all.”