The Valiants of Virginia

ess is e

to him and slowly crossed the cleared space to his counsel. The chairman looked severely over his eye-glasses, with his gavel lifted, and a statuesque girl, in the

gasped at the tale of the Corporation's unprecedented earnings, the lavish expenditure for its palatial offices. The recital of the tragic waste, the nepotism, the mole-like ramifications by which the vast structure had been undermined, had left

sported a diamond buckle. To the space-writers of the social columns, he had been a perennial inspiration. They had delighted to herald a more or less bohemian gathering, into which he had smuggled this pet, as a "dog-dinner"; and when one midnight, after a staid and stodgy "bridge," in a gust of wild spirits he had, for a wager, jumped into and out of a fountain on a deserted square, the act, dished up by a night-hawking reporter had, the following Sunday, inspired three metropoli

-trip-clop of the cab horses on the asphalt, the irritant clang of trolleys and the monstrous panther purr of motors. Only once had this seeming indifference been shaken: when the figures of the salary voted the Corporation's chief officers had been sardonically cited-when in the tense quiet a woman had laughed ou

brought home. The gilded fool had not brought himself into the embarrassing purview of the law. This certainty, however, had served to goad the public and sharpen the satire of the newspaper paragraphist; and the examiner, who incidentally had

s usual, but beneath the habitual pose, the worldly mask of his class, had lain a sore sensitiveness that had cringed painfully at the sneering word and the envenomed para

s boyhood. Yet his father's name would now go down, linked not to success and achievement, but to failure, to chicanery, to the robbing of the poor. The thought had become a blind ache that had tortured him. Beneath the

gratuitous insolence. It had a clarity and simplicity that was almost horrifying. He did not stoop to gloze his own monumental flippancy. He had attended only one directors'

he young egoist who sat secure, his own millions safe, on the ruins of the enterprise from which they were derived. The questions, that had been bland with suave innuendo, acquired

gn to Vanity Valiant, the club habitué, the spoiled scion of wealth. For a brief five minutes he spoke, in a fashion that surprised the court room-a passionate defense of his father, the principles on which the C

that he had rendered services commensurate with the annual sums paid him? The witness thought that he had, in fact, received just about what th

c silence. "I have never drawn a salary

the ripple had swept over the assemblage, and Katharine Fargo, gazing, had smil

-faced girl on the arm of a gray-bearded man in black frock coat a

ssed Niagara Falls. I must write Shirley Dandridge about it. I'm

ot," said her uncle. "I liked t

rected, with a glance at his watch, "and be qui

ollar'n a

know the legal fare," he said, "if I am from Virginia.

th narrow eyes, sat beside a table on which lay a small black satchel with a padlock on its handle, whose contents-several bundles of crisp papers-

red. The newcomer was gray-haired, slightly stooped and lean-jowled, with a h

the desk, "do you notice

aid judicially, "unless it's that ne

ad this-from young Valiant

ons!" he said in a hushed voice. "Why, unless I've been misin

h his resignation as a vice-president, and without a

rfectly certain they can bring nothing home to him-" He paused. "Of course I suppose it'll save the Corporation, eh? But i

knew his father," he said. "He ha

d them carefully with the satchel in a safe.

used to be afraid my Katharine had a leaning to