"Not always. But if my perception of honor were less keen, I should laugh at what you call your evidence."
"Laugh?"
"Yes, indeed. I very well understand the tremendous power of money."
"Not more than I," sadly.
She laughed brokenly. "More than you. I can picture to you just what will happen." She rose. "There will, of course, be a great newspaper clamor; the interstate commissioners will put their heads together; there will be investigations by the government. That will be the attack. The keenest lawyers are on the side of corporations; that is because the state is niggard with her pay. Let me outline the defense. Father will resign from his high office, to be reëlected later when the public cools off! A new directorate will fill the place of the present one. Suddenly falsified entries will be discovered; the head bookkeeper will have disappeared. All fingers will point to him. He will be in South America, having been paid several thousand to go there. All this will make the passing of the dividend perfectly logical. The matter will never be tried in court. Money will do all this."
"My dear little woman, you reason like Pythagoras; but," Carrington added gravely, "when I undertook to untangle this affair, I realized its huge proportions. For every redoubt your father has, I have an assault, for every wall a catapult, for every gate a petard. But, as I said before, you have only to say the word, and for the present nobody will be any the wiser."
"If I permitted you to do this, I should destroy my faith in both of us. It would erect a barrier which would be insurmountable. That is not the way out."
"I have weighed all these things," discouragedly.
He took the document from his pocket and caught it in a way that indicated how easily it might be ripped into halves, the halves into quarters, the quarters into infinitesimal squares of meaningless letters.
"Once more, shall I, Kate?"