Marshall ceased his earnest scrutiny of his partner's face to rest his elbow on the edge of his desk and to drop his weary old face into the hollow of his hand. There were more wrinkles on his cheeks, more white hairs in the dull dry red of his beard, more signs of sleepless hours in his anxious eyes. Belden raised his hand and swept it across his mustache. The smile beneath escaped and spread upward over his face. His nostrils, too, dilated--half triumphally. "It's a most unfortunate affair," he observed further, continuing his series of careful modulations. "There is an error made, a false step taken; the family flee their past to begin life anew in another land; yet at the very threshold of their new life they meet the first cause of all their misfortune and misery." Belden sighed. His sigh seemed at once to breathe a deep sympathy and to call for the meting out of justice at whatever cost--to some one else. As Belden sighed, Marshall himself almost gave a groan. He accepted these carefully composed observations for precisely what they seemed. He was too inexperienced in the drama to detect the essential insincerity of every word, though there was not one of the lowliest of his clerks but had heard every one of these phrases bandied across the footlights time and time again. "I must acknowledge," continued Belden, as he moved towards the door, "that her father has acted with a good deal of reasonableness and forbearance. You can imagine Leppin's anxiety, without any word from me. You can feel how keenly he looks forward to having justice done--to having complete reparation made. You know what that means as well as I do." And he passed out, leaving his senior to ponder the matter alone. Belden was the first person with whom Marshall had permitted himself a full canvass of the situation, the sole husbandman towards whom he had turned for assistance in garnering the first-fruits of Truesdale's career abroad. Never before had evil grazed against him and his; he had regarded it, in fact, as something appertaining principally to ill-regulated persons in a lower walk of life. He had heard of such subjects as being handled in fiction, and he had noticed them touched upon in the theatrical reviews of the newspapers. But nothing of the sinful, the vicious, the malodorous had ever, within his recollection, come to his family, to his friends, or even to any of his business associates. Yet here it had come at last, and it must be confronted. He had quite shrank from the ordeal of considering the matter with so nimble and experienced a person as Truesdale himself, and he was almost too Anglo-Saxon in his pure-mindedness to attempt an over-intimate discussion of it with his own wife; it took a large share of his fortitude to broach the matter even to his elder son. "I can't talk to Truesdale about it," said this virginal old man, as he sat in Roger's office; "you've got to do it. I can't."