There was a long and most uncomfortable pause, and it is doubtful if the editor did not feel it as much as did the man opposite him.  The editor turned to his friend for a glance of sympathy, or of disapproval even, but that gentleman still sat bending forward with his eyes fixed on the floor, while he tapped with the top of his cane against his teeth.

“You don’t mean,” said Mr. Aram, in a strangely different voice from which he had last spoken, “that you would do that?”

“Yes, I do,” blustered the editor.  But even as he spoke he was conscious of a sincere regret that he had not come alone.  He could intuitively feel Bronson mapping out the story in his mind and memorizing Aram’s every word, and taking mental notes of the framed certificates of high membership in different military and masonic associations which hung upon the walls.  It had not been long since the editor was himself a reporter, and he could see that it was as good a story as Bronson could wish it to be.  But he reiterated, “Yes, I mean to give it to the papers to-night.”

“But think,” said Aram—­“think, sir, who I am.  You don’t want to ruin me for the rest of my life just for a matter of fifteen dollars, do you?  Fifteen dollars that no one has lost, either.  If I’d embezzled a million or so, or if I had robbed the city, well and good!  I’d have taken big risks for big money; but you are going to punish me just as hard, because I tried to please my wife, as though I had robbed a mint.  No one has really been hurt,” he pleaded; “the men who wrote the poems—­they’ve been paid for them; they’ve got all the credit for them they can get.  You’ve not lost a cent.  I’ve gained nothing by it; and yet you gentlemen are going to give this thing to the papers, and, as you say, sir, we know what they will make of it.  What with my being my father’s son, and all that, my father is going to suffer.  My family is going to suffer.  It will ruin me—­”

The editor put the papers back into his pocket.  If Bronson had not been there he might possibly instead have handed them over to Mr. Aram, and this story would never have been written.  But he could not do that now.  Mr. Aram’s affairs had become the property of the New York newspaper.

He turned to his friend doubtfully.  “What do you think, Bronson?” he asked.

At this sign of possible leniency Aram ceased in his rocking and sat erect, with eyes wide open and fixed on Bronson’s face.  But the latter trailed his stick over the rug beneath his feet and shrugged his shoulders.

“Mr. Aram,” he said, “might have thought of his family and his father before he went into this business.  It is rather late now.  But,” he added, “I don’t think it is a matter we can decide in any event.  It should be left to the firm.”

“Yes,” said the editor, hurriedly, glad of the excuse to temporize, “we must leave it to the house.”  But he read Bronson’s answer to mean that he did not intend to let the plagiarist escape, and he knew that even were Bronson willing to do so, there was still his City Editor to be persuaded.