She was silent for a moment. Then she continued:
"And sometimes even fine, honest men are tempted, are they not, to gamble with money which is not theirs?"
"Many have done so. The prisons are full of them. There is nothing so dangerous as the get-rich-quick fever. All the men who gamble in stocks have it. It becomes a mania, an obsession. Their judgment becomes warped; they lose all sense of right and wrong."
"There's something else I want to ask you. What do you think of Signor Keralio?"
He hesitated a moment before he answered. Then, with some warmth, he said:
"As I told you before, I think he's a crook, only we can't prove it. I've been looking up his record. It's a bad one. The fellow has behaved himself so far in New York, but out West he is known under various names as one of the slickest rogues that ever escaped hanging. At one time he was the chief of a band of international crooks and blackmailers that operated in London, Paris, Buenos Ayres, and the City of Mexico. The scheme they usually worked was to get some prominent man so badly compromised that he would pay any amount to save himself from exposure, and they played so successfully on the fears of their victims that they were usually successful."
A worried look came into the young wife's face. Perhaps there was more in Signor Keralio's relations with her husband than she had suspected. Quickly she asked:
"Why do they permit a man of that character to be at large?"
The lawyer shrugged his shoulders.
"You can't proceed against a man unless there is some specific charge made. The police have nothing now against him. He may have reformed for all I know. But that was his record some years ago."