sort of dress-rehearsal--a foretaste of what it'll be in public. The
truth is, I'm a little jumpy. The rôle's so new to me that it means
something to get an idea of how to play it on nerve. I recall you as a
little chap," he added, in another tone, "when Tom Davenant and his wife
first took you. Got you out of an orphanage, didn't they, or something
like that? If I remember rightly, your name was Hall or Hale--"

"It was Hallett--Peter Hallett."

"Hallett, was it? Well, it will do no harm for a young Cæsar of finance
like you to see what you may come to if you're not careful. Morituri te
salutamus, as the gladiators used to say. Only I wish it was to be the
arena and the sword instead of the court-room and the Ride with Morrowby
Jukes."

Davenant said nothing, not because he had nothing to say, but because
his thoughts were incoherent. Perhaps what was most in the nature of a
shock to him was the sight of a man whom he both admired for his
personality and honored as a pillar of Boston life falling so tragically
into ruin. While it was true that to his financially gifted mind any
misuse of trust funds had the special heinousness that horse-lifting has
to a rancher, yet as he stood with Guion's hand on his shoulder he knew
that something in the depths of his being was stirred, and stirred
violently, that had rarely been affected before. He had once, as a boy,
saved a woman from drowning; he had once seen a man at an upper window
of a burning house turn back into the fire while the bystanders
restrained him, Davenant, from attempting an impossible rescue.
Something of the same unreasoning impulse rose up within him now--the
impulse to save--the kind of impulse that takes no account of the merit
of the person in peril, seeing only the danger.