“Of course, I am in your hands in the matter. I have committed myself with the crowd outside to the statement that they should be punished. I was full, then, of angry feelings; and I still think that they ought to be punished. But it is really your question, not mine. And I may even tell you that there would probably be a considerable financial advantage in settling the thing with them, instead of taking it before the grand jury.”
“That is a consideration which we won’t discuss,” said Kate. “If my mind were clear as to the necessity of a prosecution, I would not alter the decision for any amount of money. But my sister and I have been talking a great deal about this matter, and we feel—You know that Mr. Boyce was, for a time, on quite a friendly footing in this house.”
“Yes; I know.” Reuben bowed his head gravely.
“Well, you yourself said that if one was prosecuted, they all must be.”
“No doubt. Wendover and Tenney were smart enough to put the credulous youngster in the very forefront of everything. Until these affidavits came to hand to-day, it would have been far easier to convict him than them.”
“Precisely,” urged Kate. “Credulous is just the word. He was weak, foolish, vain—whatever you like. They led him into the thing. But I don’t believe that at the outset, or, indeed, till very recently, he had any idea of being a party to a plan to plunder us. There are reasons,” the girl blushed a little, and hesitated, “to be frank, there are reasons for my thinking so.”
Reuben, noting the faint flush of embarrassment, catching the doubtful inflection of the words, felt that he comprehended everything, and mirrored that feeling in his glance.
“I quite follow you,” he said. “It is my notion that he was deceived, at the beginning.”
“Others deceived him, and still more he deceived himself,” responded Kate.
“And that is why,” put in Ethel, “we feel like asking you not to take the matter into the courts—I mean so as to put him in prison. It would be too dreadful to think of—to take a man who had dined at your house, and been boating with you, and had driven with you all over the Orange Mountains, picking wild-flowers for you and all that, and put him into prison, where he would have his hair shaved off, and tramp up and down on a treadmill. No; we mustn’t do that, Mr. Tracy.”