never been put aside; which nobody ever meant to
put aside! My God! they've let me stultify myself in a thousand ways;
let me sit here day after day with a lie in my mouth, saying things that
nobody in this God-forsaken homeland of mine has believed for a single
minute! After it's all over, every man who has listened to me will say
that I _knew_--that all this talk about openness and fair dealing was
simply that much dust-throwing to hide the workings of a corrupt and
criminal machine grinding away in the background!"

He turned to his desk and sat with his head propped in his hands,
staring at the little photograph of Wartrace Hall which he had had
mounted in a plate-glass paper-weight. The sight gave an added twist to
the torture screw and he broke out again.

"I've been nothing more than a bit of potter's clay, and the master
potter--God help me!--is my own father! It's all plain enough now. He
saw that I wasn't going to fall in with the attorney-general scheme; or
perhaps he saw that I might be a stumbling-block if I should; so he
planned this thing with McVickar--planned it deliberately! There is no
fight, after all; it's merely one of the moves in the game that the
'boss' and the railroad should seem to be fighting each other. Good God!
I can't believe it, and yet I've got to believe it. That man Hathaway
is a self-confessed criminal, but he was telling the truth about the
law-breaking trickery that is going on; he wouldn't be idiotic enough to
lie and then give me a chance to prove the lie. And he didn't come to me
of his own volition; he was sent--sent to break me down, and sent by....
Oh, dad, dad! how could you do it!"

With his face hidden in the crook of his arm, he was groping in vain
outreachings for something to lay hold of, for some clear-minded,
clean-hearted adviser who could tell him what to do; how he should
clamber out of this pit of humiliation into which nothing more culpable
than an honest zeal for civic righteousness had precipitated him. In his
despair he told himself that there was no one, and then suddenly he
remembered--Patricia would know, and she would understand better than
any one else in a populous world how to point the way out of the
labyrinth. He must go to her and tell her. In the meantime....

He got up and shut his desk with a slam. In the meantime there should be
no more lies told--no more turns taken in the crooked path. Collins, the
stenographer, heard the noise of the desk