ed silent. Now he turned
upon his visitors. A Levantine, burly, unshaven, and soiled, towered
truculently above him. Young Mr. Andrews with his swivel chair tilted
back, his hands clasped behind his head, his cigarette hanging from his
lips, regarded the man dispassionately.

"You gotta hell of a nerve to come to see me," he commented cheerfully.
To Mr. Thorndike, the form of greeting was novel. So greatly did it
differ from the procedure of his own office, that he listened with
interest.

"Was it you," demanded young Andrews, in a puzzled tone, "or your
brother who tried to knife me?" Mr. Thorndike, unaccustomed to cross
the pavement to his office unless escorted by bank messengers and
plain-clothes men, felt the room growing rapidly smaller; the figure of
the truculent Greek loomed to heroic proportions. The hand of the banker
went vaguely to his chin, and from there fell to his pearl pin, which he
hastily covered.

"Get out!" said young Andrews, "and don't show your face here--"

The door slammed upon the flying Greek. Young Andrews swung his swivel
chair so that, over his shoulder, he could see Mr. Thorndike. "I don't
like his face," he explained.

A kindly eyed, sad woman with a basket on her knee smiled upon Andrews
with the familiarity of an old acquaintance.

"Is that woman going to get a divorce from my son," she asked, "now that
he's in trouble?"

"Now that he's in Sing Sing?" corrected Mr. Andrews. "I HOPE so! She
deserves it. That son of yours, Mrs. Bernard," he declared emphatically,
"is no good!"

The brutality shocked Mr. Thorndike. For the woman he felt a thrill of
sympathy, but at once saw that it was superfluous. From the secure and
lofty heights of motherhood, Mrs. Bernard smiled down upon the assistant
district attorney as upon a naughty child. She did not even deign a
protest. She continued merely to smile. The smile reminded Thorndike of
the smile on the face of a mother in a painting by Murillo he had lately
presented to the chapel in the college he had given to his native town.

"That son of yours," repeated young Andrews, "is a leech. He's robbed
you, robbed his wife. Best thing I ever did for YOU was to send him up
the river."

The mother smiled upon him beseechingly.

"Could you give me a pass?" she said.

Young Andrews flung up his hands and appealed to Thorndike.

"Isn't that just like a mother?" he protested. "That son of hers has
broken her heart, tramped on her, cheated h