been displeased to know how little her curt refusal
affected the emotional state of the man driving away from her door. It
was the deed rather than the word that he remembered--the fact that he
had held a beautiful and eventually unresisting woman in his arms that
occupied his attention on his way home.

He found his mother sitting up--not for him. It was many years since
Mrs. O'Bannon had gone to bed before two o'clock. She was a large woman,
massive rather than fat. She was sitting by the fire in her bedroom,
wrapped in a warm, loose white dressing gown, as white as her hair and
smooth pale skin. Her eyes retained their deep darkness. Evidently Dan's
gray eyes had come from his father's Irish ancestry.

It was only the other day--after he was grown up--that O'Bannon had
ceased to be afraid of his mother. She was a woman passionately
religious, mentally vigorous and singularly unjust, or at least
inconsistent. It was this quality that made her so confusing and, to her
subordinates, alarming. She would have gone to the stake--gone with a
certain bitter amusement at the folly of her destroyers--for her belief
in the right; but her affections could entirely sweep away these beliefs
and leave her furiously supporting those she loved against all moral
principles. Her son had first noticed that trait when she sent him away
to boarding school. His mother--his father had died when he was
seven--was a most relentless disciplinarian as long as a question of
duty lay between him and her; but let an outsider interfere, and she was
always on his side. She frequently defended him against the school
authorities, and even, it seemed to him, encouraged him in rebellion. In
her old age most of her strong passions had died away and left only her
God and her son. Perhaps it was a trace of this persecutory religion in
her that made Dan accept his present office.

She looked up like a sibyl from the great volume she was reading.

"You're late, my son."

"I've been gambling, mother."

He said it very casually, but it was the last remnant of his fear that
made him mention particularly those of his actions of which he knew she
would disapprove. In old times he had been a notable poker player, but
had abandoned it on his election as district attorney. Her brow
contracted.

"You should not do such things--in your position."

"My dear mother, haven't you yet grasped that there is a touch of the
criminal in all criminal prosecutors? That'