But though they badgered him for hours, lured him by every pretext to
confess, put a stool pigeon in the same cell with him, and resorted to
every trick, device and expedient known to the prosecutor's office to
trap him into some sort of an admission, they got nothing for their
pains. It was just one of those cases where the evidence simply wasn't
forthcoming. And yet Peckham was aware that unless he convicted
O'Connell his name would indeed be mud--or worse. This story, however,
is concerned less with the family honor of the O'Connells than with that
of the Beekmans.

Miss Althea was the last surviving member of her branch of the family.
Though she would probably have regarded it as slightly vulgar to have
been referred to as "one hundred per cent American" she was so nearly
so--except for a reminiscent affection for "the late dear Queen"--that
the phrase in her case would have been substantially correct. Her mother
had been the daughter of a distinguished Revolutionary statesman who had
been a signer of the Declaration of Independence, an ambassador and
justice of the Supreme Court as well; her father a celebrated newspaper
editor.

She had been born in the Prue and I period in Gramercy Park near what is
now The Players' Club, and the old colonial house with its white
trimmings and ornamental ironwork had been the scene of many a modest
gayety at a time when Emerson, Lowell, and George William Curtis were
viewed less as citizens than as high priests of Culture, sharing equally
in sanctity with the goddess thereof. She could just remember those
benign old gentlemen, as well as the many veterans of the Civil War who
dined at her father's decorous mahogany and talked of the preservation
of the Constitution and those other institutions to found which it is