"Father Honoré," Mr. Van Ostend spoke with apparent effort, "I know I am right in my reasoning—and you are right in your fundamentals. We both may be wrong in the end, you in appealing to me for this aid to restrain prosecution, and I in giving it. Time alone will show us. But if we are, we must take the consequences of our act. If, by yielding, I make it easier for another man to do as Champney Googe has done, may God forgive me; I could never forgive myself. If you, in asking this, have erred in freeing from his punishment a man who deserves every bit he can get, you will have to reckon with your own conscience.—Don't misunderstand me. No spirit of philanthropy influences me in my act. Don't credit me with any 'love-to-man' attitude. I am going to advance the sum necessary to avoid prosecution if you find him; but I do it solely on that mother's account, and"—he hesitated—"because I don't want her, whom you have just seen, connected, even remotely, by the thought of what a penitentiary term implies. I don't want to entertain the thought that even the hem of my child's garment has been so much as touched by a hand that will work at hard labor for seven, perhaps fifteen, years. And I want you to understand that, in yielding, my principle remains unchanged. I owe it to you to say this much, for you have dealt with me as man to man."
"Mr. Van Ostend, we may both be in the wrong, as you say; if it prove so, I shall be the first to acknowledge my error to you. My one thought has been to save that mother further agony and to give a man, still young, another chance."
"I've understood it so."
He went to his writing table, sat down at it, and, for a moment, busied himself with making out his personal check for one hundred thousand dollars payable to the Flamsted Granite Quarries Company. He handed it to Father Honoré to look at. The priest read it.
"Whatever bail is needed, if an arrest should follow now," said Mr. Van Ostend further and significantly, "I will be responsible for."
The two men clasped hands and looked understandingly into each other's eyes. What each read therein, what each felt in the other's palm beats, they realized there was no need to express in words.
"Let me hear, Father Honoré, so soon as you learn anything definite; I'll keep you posted so far as I hear."
"I will. Good night, Mr. Van Ostend."
On reaching the iron gates to the courtyard, the priest stepped aside to give unimpeded passage to a carriage just leaving the house. As it passed him, the electric light flashed athwart the bowed glass front, already dripping with sleet, and behind it he caught a glimpse of a girl's delicate face that rose from out the folds of a chinchilla wrap, like a flower from its sheath. She was chatting gaily with her maid.