hand and keep its counsel, how to attend upon its object as an invisible
influence rather than as an active interference.

All this Kate Peyton had told herself again and again, during those hours
of anxious calculation in which she had tried to cast Dick's horoscope; but
not in her moments of most fantastic foreboding had she figured so cruel a
test of her courage. If her prayers for him had taken precise shape, she
might have asked that he should be spared the spectacular, the dramatic
appeal to his will-power: that his temptations should slip by him in a dull
disguise. She had secured him against all ordinary forms of baseness; the
vulnerable point lay higher, in that region of idealizing egotism which is
the seat of life in such natures.

Years of solitary foresight gave her mind a singular alertness in dealing
with such possibilities. She saw at once that the peril of the situation
lay in the minimum of risk it involved. Darrow had employed no assistant in
working out his plans for the competition, and his secluded life made it
almost certain that he had not shown them to any one, and that she and Dick
alone knew them to have been completed. Moreover, it was a part of Dick's
duty to examine the contents of his friend's office, and in doing this
nothing would be easier than to possess himself of the drawings and make
use of any part of them that might serve his purpose. He had Darrow's
authority for doing so; and though the act involved a slight breach of
professional probity, might not his friend's wishes be invoked as a secret
justification? Mrs. Peyton found herself almost hating poor Darrow for
having been the unconscious instrument of her son's temptation. But what
right had she, after all, to suspect Dick of considering, even for a
moment, the act of which she was so ready to accuse him? His unwillingness
to let her see the drawings might have been the accidental result of
lassitude and discouragement. He was tired and troubled, and she had chosen