“But after it went to the House committee on judiciary you left it to more skilful, or perhaps we’d better say, to less scrupulous hands?”

“I believe you are a witch.  Is there anything you don’t know?”

“Plenty of things.  For example, I don’t know exactly how much it cost our good friends of the ‘vested interests’ to have that bill mislaid in the committee room.  But I do know they made a very foolish bargain.”

“Beyond all doubt a most demoralizing bargain, which, to say the best of it, was only a choice between two evils.  But why foolish?”

“Because—­well, because mislaid things have a way of turning up unexpectedly, you know, and—­”

He stopped her in a sudden gust of feverish excitement.

“Tell me what you mean in one word, Miss Van Brock.  Don’t those fellows intend to stay bought?”

She smiled pityingly.

“You are very young, Mr. David—­or very honest.  Supposing those ‘fellows’, as you dub the honorable members of the committee on judiciary, had a little plan of their own; a plan suggested by the readiness of certain of their opponents to rush into print with statements which might derange things?”

“I am supposing it with all my might.”

“That is right; we are only supposing, you must remember.  We may suppose their idea was to let the excitement about the amended bill die down; to let people generally, and one fiercely honest young corporation attorney in particular, have time to forget that there was such a thing as House Bill Twenty-nine.  And in such a suppositional case, how much they would be surprised, and how they would laugh in their sleeves, if some one came along and paid them handsomely for doing precisely what they meant to do.”

David Kent’s smile was almost ferocious.

“My argument is as good now as it was in the beginning:  they have yet to reckon with the man who will dare to expose them.”

She turned from him and spoke to the footman at the door.

“Thomas, fetch Mr. Kent’s coat and hat from the dressing-room.”  And then to Kent, in the tone she might have used in telling him of the latest breeziness of the member from the Rio Blanco:  “I remember now what it was that I wanted to tell you.  While you have been trying to find Mr. Ormsby, the committee on judiciary has been reporting the long-lost House Bill Twenty-nine.  If you hurry you may be in time to see it passed—­it will doubtless go through without any tiresome debate.  But you will hardly have time to obstruct it by arousing public sentiment through the newspapers.”

David Kent shook the light touch of her hand from his arm and set his teeth hard upon a word hot from the furnace of righteous indignation.  For a moment he fully believed she was in league with the junto; that she had been purposely holding him in talk while the very seconds were priceless.

She saw the scornful wrath in his eyes and turned it aside with a swift denial.