BOOK III

FOR THE PEOPLE

I

Again the spring had come to Illinois, spilling the prairie flowers over the pastures, and warming the pleasant smelling earth which the mold-boards of the plows rolled back in rich loamy waves to make ready for the corn. In the town the trees rustled their new leaves in the wind that blows forever across the miles of prairie land, and the lawns along Sangamon Avenue were of a tender green, as their blue grass sprouted again under rake and roller. The birds were as busy as men, and everywhere, under the high blue sky, were the sounds that come with the awakening world, the glad sounds of preparation for every new endeavor.

The windows of the Harkness home were open, their lace curtains blowing white and cool in the young winds. Yet there, all was still. Upstairs, on his bed, with his hands folded whitely under the sheet that was smoothed across his breast, Ethan Harkness lay dead.

They buried him at Oakwood, just outside the town, beside the wife who had gone there so many springs before; buried him by the bulky monument he had raised, in his methodical business way, long ago. Its broad base glimmered between the trees, and from afar, the raised letters of his name could be read. The directors of the bank where he had spent his life, the bank he had founded, testified a belated appreciation of his virtues by adopting a long series of resolutions in which they submissively ascribed to an all-wise and inscrutable Providence the dispensation which they had done their part to hasten. They ordered, too, that the curtains of the bank be pulled down on the day of his funeral, and the door placarded "Closed," though old Morton was kept there to collect the notes and interest falling due that day.

Then some ancient citizen, who was spending his declining years in chronicling for his own satisfaction the insignificant happenings of each day, chiefly the temperature and the times and local effect of frost, reminded the city council that Harkness had once, long years before, sat as a member of that body, and it likewise adopted resolutions. The local lodge of Masons took charge of his funeral, after Doctor Abercrombie of St. James had read the service in his beautiful voice, and recited one of his little compositions.

And when Pusey had published an obituary in his best elegiac style, all the conventions were considered as having been duly observed, and the town turned from its tribute to the dead, to judge Harkness for his deeds to the living who remained behind.

His will was proffered for probate in the County Court some days after his funeral. It had been drawn ten years before, and as drawn originally, left all his property to Emily, save a small bequest to a sister who lived somewhere in far off New Hampshire. But a codicil, drawn two years before his death, altered this original provision. To Garwood, he directed that one thousand dollars in cash be paid by his executors, and the rest and residue of his property of every kind, nature and description, real, personal and mixed, he left in trust for his beloved daughter Emily during her lifetime, and at her death, to her children, heirs of her body, in equal shares. Garwood was not named as one of the trustees.

The will, of course, was not satisfactory to any one in Grand Prairie. There were many there who had pictured to themselves their young congressman in the rôle of a lawyer without a practice, but with a predilection for politics, and a young wife of independent means. They knew how well he could cut this eminently respectable figure, and they had some dim conception of the service he could render in theoretical reform, if he only had money enough to place him above the vulgar necessities of the common politician.

Garwood himself suffered keenly, though his pride was hardly touched as much as Emily's. He had had dreams himself, but now--he closed his memory to them. He even told Emily that he would not touch the thousand dollars, but finally consented to do so in order to please her. And then he suddenly remembered that the mortgage he had placed on his mother's house was due once more that fall and he could think of no more pious use than that to which to put the money. He was consoled, however, when the inventory of the estate revealed the fact that Harkness's property had either been vastly overestimated, or had lately shrunk in values, and he learned in the court house gossip of the lawyers, that certain unprofitable investments Harkness made during the last years of his life, had excited the fears of the bank directors, and led them to remove him from his wonted sphere of activity.

Emily, in the delicacy that embarrasses refined natures in money matters, was glad when the business of settling the estate was so far under way as to require her own attention no longer. She thought it indeed concluded, though the executors, being old, and rich already, relished the two per cent. commissions allowed them by law and scented a possible extra allowance by the county judge as a reward for faithful services. So they dragged the settlement along, picked out the choicest notes from Harkness's tin box for themselves and dreaded the time when they would have to turn over so meaty a carcass to the trustees, who were itching to take hold.

Emily's grief at her father's death was deep, but placid, as grief for the aged must always be. She and Jerome lived on at the old house, though he often bemoaned the expense of keeping up so large an establishment, and discussed taking a smaller place. But they stayed on there, and the summer passed, quickly, as summers do in the intemperate zone, where winter in one form or another rages nine months in the year.

And Emily tried to think of her husband in her old ideal of him, because she was soon to become a mother again.

* * * * *

It was late October and old Mrs. Garwood, who spent much of her time now with Emily, sat in the library with her. They had a fire in the grate, the first of the season, and it cheered the somber room.

Outside the rain fell, and the wet leaves fluttering down from the trees in the yard, brushed the window panes before settling into the damp masses that choked the walks and the gutters. They had sat a long time in the bliss of silent companionship, these two women, who, though of such a different training and tradition, understood each other very well. They had been talking of housekeeping and the increased expense of living. Old Mrs. Garwood had sighed.

"I wouldn't mind nothing," she said, "if my mortgage was only--"

"If your mortgage--?" Emily let the garment in her fingers fall with her hands into her lap, and looked up with the question written large in her wide eyes.

"Yes, it's due, an' Mr. Dawson's pressin' me. Tschk, tschk, tschk! I don't know, unless Jerome--but I don't like to bother him, poor boy."

"I thought--" but Emily checked herself. She took up the little dress she had been working on. John Ethan, who had been writhing restlessly at her feet, looked suddenly into his mother's face, and something there silenced him, so that he was very quiet.

The next morning, after breakfast, she and Jerome were alone.

"Jerome," Emily said in the voice that made him lay down his paper, and look up with serious eyes, "Jerome, I thought you were going to pay off mother's mortgage for her."

"You did?"

"Yes."

"Why so?"

"Why, you said so, at the time, you remember."

"At what time?"

"Well, when you got your thousand dollars from--"

"Oh, am I never to hear the last of that thousand dollars!" Garwood exclaimed, dashing his paper to the floor. "Must I always have that thrown up to me! I wish I'd never seen it!"

"It isn't that, Jerome, you told me you had paid mother's mortgage with it, that's all."

Garwood looked at her angrily a moment.

"You're mistaken there, I reckon, you must be mistaken. I said, perhaps, that I would pay it off with that, but not that I had. I did intend to, but I had to use the money in another place. I--" But he could proceed no further then. He was thinking of the big poker game in the Leland the night the state central committee met at Springfield.

Emily dropped the subject from her conversation, but she did not drop it from her thoughts. It was with her all that day, and it was the first thing in her mind the next morning, So incessantly did it recur to her, that, in search of relief, she went finally to the bank. She asked for old Morton, and when he shuffled up to the window, she made him go with her back to the directors' room, haunted as it was with memories of her father.

"They sell mortgages sometimes, don't they?" she asked as soon as they were alone.

"Yes, yes," her father's old clerk replied, delighted at being consulted confidentially in matters of finance.

"And could you get one for me, if I gave you the money, and told you the one?"

He smiled, as he had seen his superiors smile. It would be a treat for him to buy someone's mortgage. She told him, and he scratched his head a moment. "I think," he said, "that's over't the Polk National; I ain't sure now, but it seems to me--"

"Well, find out," said Emily, and the old man started.

"You spoke just like your father then," he said, in a mild, reminiscent way that touched her.

He managed the matter for her in the end, and she bought the mortgage by borrowing the money of one of her trustees, who said he was glad to advance it to her, though he was careful to take out the interest for himself in advance.

Emily had the mortgage canceled, and took it herself to her mother-in-law that night.

"Here it is, mother," she said, "Jerome had forgotten it. You know how neglectful he is!" And she smiled, as if she had named a virtue in the man.

"Law, yes!" said Mrs. Garwood, folding the mortgage in her trembling fingers. "Bless the boy! He always puts things off, but he never forgets his poor old mother in the end!"

II

The Emersons had arrived in Washington at the beginning of February. Their trunks, scuffed with constant travel but given a cosmopolitan air of distinction by the _etiquettes_ with which they were plastered, were ranged around the room in which the Emersons had quartered themselves at the Arlington, and stood with yawning lids, ready for Dade to dive into them after some new toilet with which to astound the guests when she swept into the dining-room.

Her mother, spent by the long winter voyage, had collapsed upon arrival, and had taken her meals in her room, vowing that if she could reach Grand Prairie alive, she would never leave there again. She was anxious now, to have Doctor Larkin undertake her cure. No one, she assured Dade, had ever understood her case as well as he, and no one had ever helped her as he had helped her. She longed to start for home immediately; but she did not feel equal to the trip just then; it would be necessary for her to remain in Washington awhile and gather strength for the journey.

Meanwhile, as she lingered, Dade gloried in the Washington spring. She had become enthusiastically American. She visited all the guide-book places about Washington; she said she was making a study of American history. In a week during which she had met several unreconstructed rebels, though the bloody shirt was then happily passing as an issue in politics, she had become intensely Southern in her sympathies. She bemoaned the lost cause as bitterly as a widow of a Confederate brigadier; she longed for a return of the golden days of Southern chivalry, and she yearned ineffably as she pictured herself on some old Virginia plantation attended by a retinue of black slaves whom she would have patronized so graciously and kept so busy.

Each morning she bought a huge bunch of violets from an old white-headed negro, in order to hear his "Lawd bless you, Missy!" It seemed to put her in touch with the days she never had known, and never could know.

She importuned her mother, too, for details of her ancestry, a subject in which she had never displayed an interest before, and, though her mother pleaded headache, she was at last enabled to recall and body forth, though vaguely, a long dead grandmother whom tradition pictured as a Virginia lady, an F. F. V., in fact.

And then Dade's English accent became a Southern dialect, and it was with a delight that had its own regret, that she heard some one in the hotel parlor ask her one evening what part of the South she came from. An experienced ear would have detected Dade's little deception through its inability to localize her dialect, for if she had heard a Virginian speak, she straightway spoke like a Virginian, if a Kentuckian, like a Kentuckian, if a Georgian, then like a Georgian, and the result was that she mimicked all and mastered the tongue of none.

Yet her honesty compelled her to disclaim Southern birth, though she qualified her denial and regained the place she had momentarily lost in the estimation of her interlocutor by telling him that her family, or part of them, had come from Virginia. Those evenings in the hotel parlor were unsatisfying, however, and she tired of the limits its walls set to her social evolutions.

It was, therefore, with a joy that lent a heightened color to her face, and showed her white teeth in a genuine smile of welcome, that she saw approaching her one evening across the dining-room a young man whose stride and carriage marked him for an officer in the regular army. His waist was as slender and his body as correctly bent as when he had been a shavetail just out of West Point, though that he had seen some sort of service was shown by his face, burned to an Apache bronze by the sun of New Mexico.

He wore his civilian clothes, somewhat old in style, with the unaccustomed air that sits on the army officer when he is out of uniform. Dade did not restrain the look of pleasure that comes to any girl's eyes at the sight of a soldier, especially a soldier with whom she may claim acquaintance, and as his friendly face broke into smiles, she said:

"Why, Mistuh Beck, who would have thought of meeting yo' all heah! Ah thought yo' weh aout fighting Indians somewheah."

"I'm stationed here now," the young lieutenant explained, and then: "The world is very small!" he marveled, making that trite remark with the self-evident pleasure that showed he considered it original. "May I?" He laid a hand tentatively on the back of a chair at her table, and bowed low in his pantomime of asking if he might sit with her.

"Ce'tainly," she said.

"And Mrs. Emerson is well?"

"She takes heh meals in heh room. We ah only waiting heah fo' heh to recovah sufficiently to unde'take the journey aout to Illinois."

They were so much together after that that the ladies of the hotel, who could not have known that the young people had become acquainted long ago in St. Louis, reveled in a new subject for gossip and pitied the poor woman lying ill in her room and neglected by a daughter who spent her time flirting with an army officer. Dade, by some spiritual divination, apprehended all they were saying, and took a delight of her own in shocking them. So the flirtation raged furiously, and Dade, by delicate pathological suggestions, developed her mother's present indisposition into the disease that was her Washington doctor's specialty.

Beck and Dade had gone to the Capitol one day, and, when Dade expressed a wish to see how the laws were made, had gone into the gallery of the House. Below them the members were lolling in their seats, their feet on their desks, reading newspapers, yawning or chatting, while the business of the nation, or of the party then in power in the nation, was being listlessly transacted.

The Speaker, sitting in his solemn chair, looked small in the distance, the clerks below him bowed over their work. Now and then the Speaker's voice could be heard, now and then the sharp fall of the gavel startled the common drone of voices. Some member far across the House, beyond the littered sea of desks, was speaking. His voice came to them scarcely at all. He held a bundle of notes in one trembling hand, with the other he now and then pushed his spectacles up on his sweating nose.

A cup of water stood on his desk, and he drank from it frequently in the agony of getting through the ordeal that was necessary to supply the voters in his far-away Ohio district with copies of that speech. By the time it got into the _Congressional Record_, it would be well parenthesized with applause, and thus paint for his constituents a scene of a decorous, black-coated House, hanging rapt upon his words, and breaking occasionally into cheers that could not be controlled. The members lolled and read, and all about this speaker seats were empty, standing there in wooden patience as if waiting for him to end. At last the Speaker of the House turned from the man to whom he had been whispering, and his gavel fell.

"The gentleman's time has expired," he said.

The Ohioan stopped, and when he asked leave to extend his remarks in the _Record_, it was granted with the only enthusiasm his effort had produced.

"It's stupid," said Dade, turning to her lieutenant. "Let's go ovah to the Senate."

"It's worse there," Beck answered. "This seems to be an unexciting day."

"What ah they talking abaout?"

"Goodness knows, I don't."

"Do they?"

"Hardly. But--wait a minute!" The soldier leaned over the railing. A laugh had rung below him. Sharp words had been spoken. A question had been flung across the House. On both sides, Republican and Democratic, members had sprung to their feet. The Speaker had arisen, and stood with his gavel alertly poised. There were several nervous cries of,

"Mr. Speaker! Mr. Speaker!"

Beck saw one member who had arisen with the rest, and who now stood with one hand raised, his finger leveled at the speaker.

"Mr. Speaker," said the member confidently.

The Speaker nodded in his direction.

"The gentleman from Illinois," he said.

The member began to speak, talking in a low tone for several moments. Something he said provoked a laugh around him. Then the House was still. He was a tall man, and his long black coat hung from heavy shoulders. As he warmed to his subject, and his coat tails swung away from his loins, they revealed a protuberant abdomen; as he warmed still more, the perspiration rolled down his cheeks and on to the neck that lay in folds of fat over his rapidly softening collar. His voice increased in volume. He became excited, he turned around in a vehement outbreak, to address directly some member who, with head bent respectfully to the fictions of parliamentary etiquette, had crept in creaking boots to a desk near the speaker, and there he now sat, a palm nursing his deaf ear. The orator turned yet more directly about, and--

"Why!" Dade cried, "that's Jerry Gahwood! He's ouah congressman!"

She craned her pretty chin forward, and leaned her elbows on the wide marble rail to hear the better.

"Do you know him?" Beck asked.

"Why, he's ouah congressman! He mah'ied Emily Ha'kness--don't yo' remembuh? The gyrl who was with me that wintah at the Van Stohn's in St. Louis?"

"Oh!" said Beck.

She turned in the more immediate personal interest his tone had awakened in her.

"Do yo' know him?" she asked.

"I? No, not exactly."

Garwood's voice was ringing loud and clear. Members came in from the lobby, from the cloak rooms, from the committee rooms. Men gathered in the seats near Garwood to hear him the better. Now and then there was the sharp rattle of clapping hands.

Dade's eyes were glowing.

"Isn't he fahn?" she said. "He's handsome, too. Ah heahd him make his great speech the night befo' he was elected--yo' heahd of it, didn't yo'?"

Beck only smiled. She turned again to listen, but her attention was not steadfast. Beck had hardly been listening at all.

"Don't yo' think him fahn?" she inquired.

"He is really a good speaker," the lieutenant admitted. Dade looked at him, fixing her brown eyes steadily in his blue ones.

"What do yo' all know abaout him?" she asked suddenly.

"Why do you ask?" he parried.

"Yo' speak so strangely--yo' ah so queah abaout him."

"Am I? I know nothing. I have been told that he came here two or three years ago with extraordinary prospects--"

"And he has not--justifahd or fulfilled them?"

"That's about it."

"Well, if that's all!" Dade said loyally, tossing her head, and then she turned once more to watch Garwood.

His speech was brief. He finished in a fine burst of eloquence, with a hand uplifted, and his black locks shaking, and then sat down, amid a volley of applause, taking the hands of those who pressed about him, and smiling at each congratulatory word, though disparagingly, as if his achievement had been a small thing for him.

"Ah must meet him!" Dade announced, suddenly arising. "We'll go. Yo' must send in yo' cahd. Can yo'? Will they let yo'?"

"Yes," the lieutenant hesitated, "but--"

"But what?" Dade stood at her full height.

"I think you'd rather not see him--here."

"Nonsense!" She stamped her foot petulantly, and her eyes flashed dangerously. "Ah mean to take him to task fo' not calling on mamma and me. Ah've known him all my life!"

The officer shrugged his shoulders. He felt that he had already said too much, more, certainly, than was prudent for an officer in the army, where feudal notions of propriety still exist.

Garwood came out of the House in response to the lieutenant's card. The air of serious and official demeanor with which he had prepared to listen to importunities about some of the army's constant appropriation bills or reorganization bills, relaxed into one of surprise and friendliness when he saw Dade standing by the side of the young officer, and it expanded into a smile of much insinuation as he bowed low and took the girl's hand.

"I'm delighted, I'm sure," he said.

She presented the lieutenant, and the men bowed.

"I've met Lieutenant Beck before," Garwood said. "Glad to meet him again--always glad to meet the officers of our little army, aren't we, Miss Dade?"

He was red and perspiring, and stretched his neck now and then, that he might press his handkerchief below his collar.

"We have been listening to yo' speech, Mistuh Gahwood," Dade said. "Ah hadn't heahd yo' speak since that night befo' the election. Do yo' remembuh?"

"Oh, yes," the congressman replied, and he laughed. "That seems years ago, doesn't it?"

"Not to me," she corrected him.

Garwood bowed, intensely.

"Pardon me, Miss Dade, you are the only one who hasn't aged since then."

Garwood had drawn a cigarette from his pocket, and as they strolled out into the rotunda, he offered the case to Beck.

"No, thanks," said Beck.

Garwood continued pinching the cigarette.

"Emil--Mrs. Gahwood is not with yo', is she?"

"No, poor girl," said Garwood. "She stayed at home this winter. It has been lonely for me, too, without her. I had hoped to have her with me, but she is not well--and then her father's death you know--"

Garwood allowed the sentence to complete in the girl's mind its own impression of the lonely wife left at home.

"She must be lonesome," Dade said.

"Yes--think of having to spend a winter in that beastly little place!" Garwood said, and then he hastened to add with an apologetic smile: "We wouldn't talk that way in Grand Prairie, Lieutenant; would we, Miss Dade?"

The two men walked with her between them, and Garwood walked close to the girl. His eyes took in her fresh face, glowing under the dotted veil, and her athletic figure, which she carried as erectly as the soldier by her side did his.

"We were going over into the Senate."

"Ah?" Garwood responded. "I'm headed in that general direction, not to hear the old men certainly, but down to the restaurant. This business of saving the nation twice a day is exhausting. Perhaps you'd--"

"No, thank yo'," said Dade, withdrawing herself subtly.

"I shall do myself the honor of calling upon you, Miss Dade," Garwood said.

She looked at him. Her eyes were cold.

"Mothuh will be glad to see yo', no doubt," she answered, and then she bowed.

Garwood stood looking after her, watching the delicate play of the muscles of her back as she walked. Then he placed the cigarette between his lips, and started for the elevators.

"He's grown fat!" Dade was saying to the army officer. "He's hoh'id! Po' little Emily!"

III

It had been a long and lonesome winter for Emily, shut up in the big house emptied of all save its memories. She was still in mourning for her father, and the conventionalities of a society that demands steadfast grief in others prevented her from seeking any diversion, even if she had had the strength or the inclination to do so. Her only companion, besides the servants, was her child, now in his third year and developing a curiosity that exhausted the little vitality that her housewifely duties had not already demanded.

Mrs. Garwood found time, of course, to "run in," as she put it, every day, though her run had to prolong itself for many blocks, and she watched Emily with a motherly solicitude. But it was Emily's heart that was lonely; she brooded constantly over her lengthened separations from Jerome. She had borne them bravely as long as they seemed but necessary postponements of the life she had wished to lead, but now it was beginning to dawn upon her that there was a spiritual separation between them, growing ever wider and wider, and the thought of this wore away day by day faith and hope, and left her sick with despair.

For this her mother-in-law could give her little consolation. Not that she lacked sympathy at heart, but the tenderness of her nature could only express itself in material ways. The finer qualities of the spirit's yearnings which, in the case of a nature like Emily's, became real necessities, she could not appreciate. If at times she was haunted by a crude intuition of Emily's subjective difficulties, she had not the power to analyze them, and if she had, she would have found little patience with them.

The life they had led did not of course meet the standards of her own conscience, but she was disposed to blame Emily as much as, if not more than, she did Jerome, and being a rigid old woman, who would have burned at the stake for any one of her little elementary principles, she would now, as she had done so many times before, consistently wag her head with the wise disapproval her years and experience of common life warranted her in expressing, and say:

"It ain't for the best, it ain't for the best. You're too young to be apart; it ain't good for you, an' it ain't good for Jerome. Young husban's should be kept at home, should be kept at home."

"But, you know, mother," Emily would argue, "I can't keep him at home, and I can't be with him there in Washington--now."

And her head drooped over the white garment she was fashioning.

But old Mrs. Garwood inexorably shook her head.

"It won't do," she insisted, "a wife's place is by her husband, an' I s'pose women becomes mothers in Washington same's anywhere else."

Emily had no strength for discussion then. It was all at one, anyway, with the monotony of her life.

It became, too, but a part of her routine to follow political developments through the newspapers, trying to supply the omissions in Jerome's infrequent letters from the broad columns of the _Congressional Record_, where, for the benefit of posterity, the national politicians keep a carefully revised record of the things they wish they had said.

If she found Jerome's name, she read eagerly, and then, dropping the paper in her lap, began once more as in the past, to body forth in imagination the whole scene--Jerome in the full flush of his oratorical excitement, his face red, his eyes blazing, his brow damp with perspiration, his black hair tumbled in the picturesque way she knew, his arm uplifted, perhaps one white cuff a little disarranged.

And then, the other congressmen crowding into the seats about him, at last the "long-continued applause," which is the only thing never expurgated from that daily magazine of fiction. In this poor way she tried to bear herself nearer to him, to remain by him, but it was not satisfying, and many times after such hopeless fancy, she wept in despair, and hugged her boy to her hungry breast, finding in his warm little body the only actual and substantial comfort her life now knew.

Emily had allowed herself to believe that serious opposition to Jerome's renomination had disappeared after his victory in his second campaign, but when with other harbingers of spring Sprague came forth in his perennial candidacy, and announcement was made that with the solid delegation of Moultrie at his disposal he would contest with Garwood for the nomination, she realized with a certain sickening at her heart that the same old trial was upon them once more.

A few days later she read that Judge Bailey of Mason--now Speaker of the House at Springfield--was also an avowed candidate for Congress, and she tried to convince herself that Jerome's chances were thereby favored because of the consequent division of the forces against him, though there were disquieting articles in the _Advertiser_ that would not let her conviction rest.

The _Advertiser_, as is customary with the opposition organ in a man's own town, exhibited a meanness in its treatment of Garwood to which it would not have descended in any cause less sacred than that of party-ism, and it now began to speak of Bailey in fulsome praise as if he were the savior of his times, though all its readers knew, and especially did Emily know, for she, doubtless, alone of all those readers, looked so far ahead, that if Bailey were successful before the convention, he would, when the campaign came on, get all the abuse her husband had been receiving.

But Emily had learned that editors, though they appeared at least ordinarily honorable in other ways, could become mendacious when they took up political questions; she had often wondered why it was that, simply because they happened to own newspapers to print them in, they could deliberately write and publish lies they would have scorned to use in discussing men in any of their relations other than political, and, while she could find no explanation except that partisanship inculcates hypocrisy, she tried to be practical and not credit anything she read in the newspapers, especially if it were disagreeable.

Pusey had loyally begun the campaign for Garwood's reëlection by writing daily editorials in his praise, and these, printed in the _Citizen_, which the postmaster continued to edit, gave Emily a welcome antidote for the _Advertiser's_ venom. Pusey published all of Garwood's speeches in full, and the _Advertiser_, with the relish of one who discloses state secrets, described the little postmaster as darkly setting up the pins for a county convention which should select a delegation to the congressional convention instructed to use all honorable means to bring about the renomination of Jerome B. Garwood.

The _Advertiser's_ editor, with a wit that sometimes illumined the recesses of his mind, printed the word "honorable" in quotation marks. This account of Pusey's secret doings was varied at times by a description of the conferences that were nightly held in the back room of the post-office. The _Advertiser_ pretended to lay bare all the ramifications of the little man's designs, and as if its duty lay in the direction of its joy, did all it could to confound his politics and frustrate his knavish tricks.

But amid all this confusion, Emily was sure of one thing, that there was another contest, with all its nervous strain, before her; that the months to come, the beautiful months of the spring and summer she had longed for as ardently as an invalid longs for the days when he can be wheeled out into the sun, would bring more abuse and recrimination, more hatred and strife, and she had grown so weary of it all. If Jerome could have become a candidate for some other office it would at least relieve the monotony, but this everlasting repetition of the unchanging sordid struggle to stay in Congress--she wished that he would leave politics altogether; she almost wished in her bitterness, that he would be defeated, if it would bring him home, and make him himself once more.

IV

Dade had provisionally accepted Beck's invitation to the Army and Navy ball, but after Mrs. Emerson had showed her endurance in an Easter service at one of the fashionable churches, there was no longer doubt that she would postpone her return to Illinois and the resumption of Doctor Larkin's treatment until that great event should have passed into history. As the night of the ball drew near, Beck was in a flutter almost feminine, and Dade's preparations went forward in such excitement that the old lady herself finally awakened an interest and determined to accompany Dade as chaperon.

Now that the night had come, she showed no regret for her decision, for, with a robust floridity that may have been but the final flowering of her carefully nurtured ailments, she sat and fanned herself all the evening, basking in the smiles of the young officers Beck brought up in reliefs to keep her from growing weary and impatient. These war-like youths in the _esprit de corps_ that had been hazed into them at the national nursery heroically stood at their posts, reminded, whenever they caught a glimpse of the proud girl in the fine state of her black chiffon gown, whirling by with their brother officer, that the honor of the service was being upheld.

"They are charming, these young officers of our army!" the old lady whispered to Dade as they were going out to supper. "So much more sincere than foreign officers, such gentlemen!"

"Of cou'se," Dade replied, but more for Beck's benefit than for her mother's, "they ah gentlemen bah Act of Congress."

The old lady fed recklessly on the salads and ices, and Dade foresaw the loud alarms that would appal the nights for a week afterwards, but Beck observed her gastronomic exploits with satisfaction, for it all meant time to him. Dade had limited him to four dances, and in the wide, wide intervals between them, he had moped in the smoking room, just as if he were the love-sick hero of a novel. But now he pressed his suit by urging more dishes on the mother, and she ate gaily and carelessly on, and drank enough coffee to insure insomnia for the whole summer. And then after supper, Dade went off with a mere civilian, and left Beck and her mother to watch the brilliant stream of uniforms flow by.

It was the male, who in a reversion to the barbaric type, made a display of toilets that night, and not the female. There were uniforms everywhere. The embowered Marine Band, itself cutting no mean figure in its white breeches and scarlet coats, played the tunes that were popular that spring, while the proud and happy men moved by in glittering splendor--navy officers, with their gold-braided dress coats and low waistcoats; army officers, in the white stripes of the infantry, the yellow of the cavalry, or the red of the artillery; the members of some local company of rifles in their cadet gray and pipe-clayed cross-belts, now and then some foreign officer in the pride of his own pulchritude, and the happy consciousness that he was serving nobly in that hour because his uniform marked him out even in all that distinction of gold-mounted clothes.

The members of the diplomatic corps, too, had come with their ribbons and stars, to give the final touch of splendor; even the Japanese and Chinese ministers with their silks and fans were there, gazing calmly on from the far misty distance of their oriental lives. There were, to be sure, some white-headed old infantry captains who had not a sign of gold cord on their breasts, but they served to show how unequally the real rewards of military service are apportioned.

Dade could see Beck, striding here and there over the ball room floor, trampling the trains of gowns, with muttered apologies as angry as the vengeful looks the ladies flung at him, but she did not cast one glance in his direction to help him in his quest. Rather, with her head inclined indolently, her long arms, in their black mousquetaire gloves, stretched straight to her knees, her fingers knit together, she sat and talked to the black-coated civilian, who, despite the eclipse into which he and all his unnoticed kind were thrown by the blaze of uniforms that night, had manfully striven to shine in his own proper luster.

Yet from the corner of her dark eye, she followed Beck's frantic evolutions as he dashed in and out among the promenading couples, assuring herself again that she had never known how handsome the young soldier was until she beheld him that night for the first time in uniform. She had always longed to see him armed and equipped, and had frankly told him so, not at all to his discomfort or displeasure, but she pictured him at such times as a kind of animated Remington figure in cavalry boots and spurs, a heavy saber hooked up at his belt, and a six-shooter in its holster swinging ready to his right hand; with gauntlets, too, a gray campaign hat to shade his eyes, and a polka-dotted handkerchief knotted at his sun-burned throat. Then, in the violet haze of the western prairies, a body of hardened troopers standing by, some picketed horses, a grizzled officer with a field glass, and perhaps some Indians on their ponies impudently galloping in far off taunting circles, had completed the picture her young imagination had made of him.

But he had presented himself before her that evening as the apotheosis of the full-dress uniform, with his cavalry cape over his shoulders--though it had one corner thrown back to give freedom to his right arm, and possibly to show its own yellow lining--and his helmet with its long yellow horse-hair plume hanging to his shoulders, and adding at least a cubit to his stature, after the cubit of a man. When they arrived at the armory, he had doffed the helmet and the cape, but it was only to display himself in the more gorgeous magnificence of his helmet cord, arranged on his breast with an intricacy that would have bewildered a lady's maid, and his heavier aiguillettes, which his detail as aide-de-camp now entitled him to wear, looped from his right shoulder.

His shoulder knots gave him an effect of greater broadness, and when he walked his long saber smote militantly against the wide yellow stripe that ran down his leg. His face, tanned to a chronic brown by the suns of the Southwest, where he had been chasing Apaches for three years, was red to-night with the heat and the excitement of this social expression of the civilization he was so glad to get back to, and his yellow hair, cropped close in the military style, was twisting tightly at his brow into the curls that he would have cultivated had he been trained to some practical occupation.

The eclipsed civilian was glad enough when the band struck up a waltz, and rescued him from Dade's comparative studies of uniforms, for if he did not quite recover his individuality with his new partner, he could at least forget it in the vertiginous mazes of the dance.

Dade, left alone, began to long for Beck's coming to save her from the ignominy of a wallflower, and, under the stress of this apprehension, she held herself more stiffly with the intention of acquiring thereby a greater visibility, and of expressing that reproach site meant him to feel in the moment when he should discover her thus deserted. She could see him still dashing here and there on the outlook for her.

He had left the middle of the floor where the gyrating dancers made his position absurd and even dangerous, and now, applying the tactics of his arm of the service, was beating up the walls of the room, feeling that there somewhere, his scout must end. When he saw her at last, his perspiring face lit up, and he bore down upon her in triumph. He sank into the chair beside her, and, drawing out a handkerchief, began to pat his brow delicately with it, though he would have liked to give his hot face a good scrubbing.

"Have yo' all been having a good tahm?" drawled Dade, with her eyes far away to where the Chinese minister was cross-examining some woman on the subject of her age and her maiden name.

"No," Beck said, bluntly.

"Ah should think yo' would," Dade replied, coldly.

Beck looked at her in alarm.

"Why?" he ventured.

"Yo' seemed to have difficulty in teahing yo'self away."

Beck's alarm became positive.

"I have been looking for you everywhere," he said in earnest defense.

"And then," she continued, as if to eliminate herself from consideration as quickly as possible, "ah yo' not in unifohm?"

She turned toward him, and inclining her head over her white shoulder, looked at him with an eye to sartorial effects.

"If you only knew how hot this dress uniform is!" He scoured his whole visage with his handkerchief, and angrily pulled at the collar that was binding his neck.

"But just think how remahkably well yo' all look in it," she said, her lips parting in a mocking smile.

"Don't, please," he said, quite seriously. "Do you think we live only for uniforms?"

"Don't yo'?" she asked. "Look at that red commodo'e theah. He comes into the hotel pahlo' every night buhsting in that unifohm--he wouldn't give it up fo' the wo'ld."

Beck smiled at the fat old sailor who was wheeling gravely around.

"If it weh not fo' the unifohms we all would have no ahmy at all," Dade persisted; "it is the unifohm that keeps the institution of milita'ism alive."

"You seem to be thinking deeply to-night," Beck replied.

"Ah nevah had such a good oppo'tunity befo' fo' studying the vanity of man."

"If you could see us in the field, you wouldn't think so," Beck said, and he managed to put the words in the tone of one who had suffered for a great cause.

Dade glanced at him. She had a glimpse of her Remington picture again. His tone had touched her. She recalled all she had read of the hardships of soldiers' lives, and she softened.

"Ah would lahk to see yo' all theah," she confessed.

"Would you?" He spoke eagerly, leaning toward her, gathering his saber into his lap. "You shall." His cheek flushed red under his brown skin. He cast a glance about the armory, striving to hide its bare walls under the flags of all nations that had been draped there. The green plants standing stolidly in their tubs offered no place for a tête-à-tête.

She cast one glance his way, and then dropped her eyes.

"Yo' swo'd theah, fo' instance, is an emblem of vanity," she went on hurriedly, in a final effort to regain her lost note of banter, "why do yo' weah it in a ball room? Ah yo' in dangeh? No, yo' me'ely wish to show that yo' can handle it skilfully in a dance--which yo' can't----" And she thrust a hand into a rent in her overskirt, and spread it over her palm in proof. "And those things, what do yo' call them? That helmet co'd, as Leftenant Wood so cahfully explained to me, that is to hold yo' helmet on; but yo' haven't yo' helmet on now. And those othah things, lak pencils, that knock in mah eyes in dancing, what good ah they?"

She touched with the tip of her finger his dangling aiguillettes. The touch thrilled him.

"Did you hear me?" he went on. All her mockery had not been heard. She knew it had not been heard, and she tried to say more, but her mind would not work; she caught her breath. They were alone on that side of the great hall. He leaned closer.

"Did you hear me?" he went on. "You shall see me so if you will. I'll take you there--will you go?"

She laughed softly.

"It would be a treat, wouldn't it," she said, "to see yo' on yo' native heath?"

His face remained serious. His jaw set.

"Dade," he said, and she flushed crimson, "it's no use--I can't say it right--only--I love you, that's all."

She hung her head.

"Do you hear, darling?" he continued, bending nearer. "Do you hear? You must excuse the bluntness of a soldier--I love you, that's all there is to it."

He clutched the scabbard of his saber in his nervousness. Her hand had fallen to her side, and with his own he seized it, and crushed it between them.

"Listen," he said, "I love you, love you, love you! Oh, if we were somewhere else! You can't say 'No' now; you must not! You do love me, you must--listen, do you hear?--you must love me! If we were elsewhere I'd take you in my arms--I'll do it anyway, here and now--what do I care? And you couldn't stop me!"

He leaned impulsively forward. She stirred, and turned her face half-frightened toward him.

"Not here!"

"Tell me, then, do you love me?"

Her eyes looked full in his, and then, without dropping one of her Western r's, she said:

"You know, Arthur."

He crushed her hand until she winced with the pain.

V

Emily and Dade had kept up a correspondence that gushed from their pens with all the olden spontaneity of their girlhood, though in the latter days this thin black-gowned matron who paused in her household duties to sit down to epistolary labors found it an effort which caused her rueful smiles to assume a character that was akin to her ancient self. Dade in her letters from Washington had hinted darkly at a secret she had to impart when they were, as she put it, heart to heart again, though her constant and enthusiastic celebration of Lieutenant Beck of the cavalry detracted somewhat from the mystery she was saving for Emily's stupefaction.

When it was at last announced to her that the Emersons were about to start for Grand Prairie, Emily welcomed the news with joy, and fondly expected to renew in Dade that blithe girlhood which, as she sadly realized, had gone from her. But when Dade appeared one morning at the bottom of the broad steps that led to the veranda of Congressman Garwood's place, as the old home of the Harknesses so soon had come to be called, and mounted them with anything but continental stateliness, Emily, standing in the doorway to meet her, saw in a flash, that however ardent and however intimate their letters may have been, their diverging lives could never meet again.

To Emily the recognition was prompter than to Dade, to whom, indeed, it never came at all. Though she had roamed all over the world, Dade had not grown in experience, unless a cosmopolite's knowledge of the conveniences of travel, a guide-book acquaintance with art galleries, and a smattering of gossip about, if not of, the fashionable courts of Europe could be called experience. She still looked out upon the world with the wide eyes of her girlhood; while Emily, though immured in all the provincialism of her little prairie town, had known the daily heart-ache and the sleepless nights in which the soul sounds all the deeps of life. So it was that out of eyes from which the scales had fallen she looked upon Dade's glowing and radiant face this May morning, and the smile that came to her was of a longing sympathy with the youth and girlhood that stood revealed before her.

Dade, swinging the jacket she had been carrying on her arm, caught Emily about the waist and led her into the house at a livelier step than she had known for many a day. Emily took her upstairs, where they could be near the new baby, who was taking a morning nap, and once in the old familiar room that Dade had known as Emily's in their girlhood, she plumped Emily down on the box couch, then plumped herself down beside her, and when the vibration of the springs had spent itself, and she had ceased to bounce up and down, Dade impetuously turned, and fixing her eyes on Emily under the brim of the mannish alpine hat she wore, she seized the matron by both shoulders and said:

"Em, Ah'm engaged!"

"Again?" smiled Emily, with the indulgence of the elder woman to a girl.

"_Again!_" cried Dade, repeating Emily's word, and arching her brows. She released her hold of Emily's shoulders, and throwing her arms behind her, rested on them like two props, while she regarded Emily with a mimicry of reproach. But her black eyebrows twitched disobediently in the mirth that was turbulent that day in her whole being.

"Again!" she repeated, trying to prolong the pose. "Yo' speak as if mah husband was d'aid, and Ah'd been mah'ied the second tahm!"

Emily gave a little distant laugh.

"I'm glad, dear," she said.

Dade regarded her curiously, and then instantly voiced her thought.

"Yo' all talk lak some kind old auntie!" she said. "Why, gyrl, yo' ahn't old's Ah am. Mah heaht's wohn to a frazzle. Ah've been engaged befo', oh, a dozen tahms, Ah reckon--mo'n yo' all evah dreamed of!"

"A dozen times!" exclaimed Emily, in real amazement, and then with a touch of the spirit of their old intimacy she said:

"But you never told me, Dade, only that once!"

"Co'se not," said Dade; "they really didn't count. Ah was on and off with them so quick. Ah wanted to wait to see if--if--the'd _take_ befo' writing yo', but they nevah did, only the one with the baron, po' ol' soul!"

"Did that one take?" asked Emily, with a languid return to the remoteness her own experience had drawn her to, and with a sigh, also, that her heart so quickly lost the perfume of the youth that a moment before had been wafted into it.

Dade was serious an instant.

"Well, yes. Ah thought it did, but yo' know, Em, those Eu'opeans ah simply _im-possible_, that's all."

"And you were engaged to twelve of them! I thought the chaperon was an institution in Europe. Yours couldn't have watched you very carefully."

"Oh, they're just to see that the gyrls _dew_ mah'y some one--that's all--but----"

"You escaped?"

"Yes, it's different with an Ame'ican gyrl, yo' know; they won't be watched, and Ah escaped."

Dade had raised her arms to her head, with a graceful preliminary flourish to loosen her sleeves at the elbows, and was withdrawing the pins that fastened her hat. Emily noticed that the pins were all headed with army buttons, with the "C" on their bright little shields that told of the despoilment of some cavalryman's forage cap. She connected these with the buckle Dade wore on her belt, the plain buckle of the West Point cadet's belt, though over the washed gold of this one was a monogram of the initials of Dade's name, "D.E.," in silver.

"Ahthu' says----" Dade began, stabbing the pins back into the hat, and flinging it beside her on the couch, "Oh, Em, he's the deahest man--pe'fectly scrumptious! Ah must tell yo' abaout him."

And she began a celebration of the young soldier, setting him in what was to her the picturesque atmosphere of a western army post, and drawing once more, in all its details, the picture she had imagined of him, booted and spurred and gauntleted, riding forth with his dusty troopers clattering behind to do the ungentle deeds that somehow have always filled the mind of the gentler sex with a sentimental pleasure.

"And oh," she said, "Ah must tell yo' abaout his being o'dehed to proceed along the South Fo'k of the--something-oah-othah--Ah must write to-day and get the name of that rivah--all hidden by cottonwoods along its banks, just lak in the books, yo' know--and destroy all Piegan Indians. He was a shavetail then, and didn't know a Piegan Indian from a Sioux, and he nea'ly brought on a wah. If it hadn't been fo' his old first se'geant--Oh, his men all love him, Ah know--eve'ybody does!"

And so she flowed on, while Emily sat and listened with the mellowed smile of an indulgence almost motherly.

"And we ah going to live in Washington at first, he's General--What's-his-name's aide now, yo' know. That's why he's allowed to weah aiguillettes; Ah must show them to yo' in his photograph. But when he's changed, we'll probably have to go to some weste'n post. Think of mah living aout theah--an ahmy woman! Ah'll have an Indian to cook fo' us, and yo' and Je--Mistuh Gahwood must come aout and visit us. He can get himself appointed on a committee to inspect ahmy posts, yo' know, yo' all can save lots of money that way. Ah've grown economical since Ah'm going to mah'y an ahmy officeh. They get awfully small salaries; it's a shame. But Mistuh Gahwood can have himself put on the committee----"

"I'm afraid Washington has corrupted you, Dade," said Emily.

"Corrupted me?" the girl repeated. "Co'se it has, it corrupts eve'ybody. That's what eve'ybody does down theah. It's all pull--that's the way Ahthu' got his detail as aide."

Emily's face had lost its smile, and had sobered.

"Yes," she breathed with a sigh. "Did you see Jerome there?"

Dade looked at Emily questioningly an instant, and then she hastened to say:

"How stupid of me! To sit heah and talk of Ahthu' when Ah ought to have known that yo' all weh dying to heah abaout yoah husband. Oh, yes, Ah saw him at a distance a numbah of times, and one day Ah met him in the rotunda of the Capitol. We weh in the gallery, Ahthu' and Ah, and had heahd him make a speech."

Emily had leaned forward a little; her lips were parted, and her teeth showed in the first smile of real interest she had displayed. She laid her hand lightly on Dade's arm, finding it a comfort to touch some one who had been there in Washington, some one who had seen him in his proper place, some one who had heard him speak, who had spoken to him and touched his hand.

"What speech was it, Dade?" she asked, eagerly. "The one in the tariff debate, or----"

"Oh, goodness me'cy me!" ejaculated Dade. "Ah don't know what it was on--yo' can't tell a wo'd they say, they all make so much noise. Ahthu' said it was lak a sun dance of the Ogallalla Sioux."

"Tell me, how did he look?" Emily's eyes were glistening.

"He looked splendid, Emily, splendid. He rose, yo' know, suddenly, and began to speak befo' Ah knew it was he at all. And he grew excited, and all the othahs crowded in to heah--it must have been a great speech."

Emily made Dade tell her all she could recall out of her scattered memories of that scene, and the glow in her eyes mingled all the love she had borne him, all the hopes she had cherished, and all the high envy of Dade, to whom it had been given to be there and behold that scene.

"And how is he looking, tell me that?" asked Emily when Dade had told her at last that she could think of no more to tell.

Dade turned toward her as if she had an unpleasant revelation to make, and said, hesitatingly:

"Well, Emily--he's grown fat!"

She thought of the trim, narrow-waisted figure of her own brown soldier lover. But Emily only laughed.

"Yes," she observed, "Mother Garwood says his father filled out at his age."

Then Dade resumed her celebration of Beck once more, and described for Emily the glories of the Army and Navy ball. And when she had done, she sat, her chin on her little white fist, and looked dreamily out of the open window into the cool green foliage of the trees, where some robins were building a nest. Emily likewise fell into reverie, and they sat there a long time before the reverie was broken. It was Dade at last who said:

"Emily, ah mah'ied people happieh than single people?"

The childishness of the question was lost upon Emily, whose thoughts had been busy with the unpleasant task of contrasting her own girlhood's dreams and their fulfilment with the dreams of Dade and their promise.

"No," she said in reply. Her voice was a mere hollow note.

"Ah yo' all happy?" said Dade.

"Y-yes," Emily answered. Her voice was still pitched on that hollow note.

Dade turned her head and looked at Emily. She saw her great eyes blinking, the tears brimming to their long lashes. She looked and wondered, looked as long as she dared. And the wide, wide distance between them she did not try to span by any words, but together they sat, and pondered on the great thing that had come into their lives, as it comes into all lives, with its hope and its frustration of hope, its joy and its death of joy, its peace and its tragedy.

VI

Though it was still early in May, though the business of the nation was pressing for attention, though the reforms promised by the party in power had not been brought to pass, and though two months must elapse before the candidates for the presidency could be nominated, six before a president could be elected, and nearly a year before he could be inducted into office, the coming national conventions already wrought a curious effect in the nation.

In the first place, that strange artificial thing which men call business felt a peculiar numbing influence stealing over it. Men began to move cautiously, to speak guardedly, to control their opinions. They grew crafty and secretive, as if the trend of events depended on what, in the next few months, they said or did. The great question, of course, was not what should be done to make the people better and happier, though there was abundant pretense that this was so, but who should get hold of the offices, for only so far as the holding of offices and the drawing of salaries could make men and those dependent upon them happier, did this question of the joy of humanity enter into the calculations of men.

Those already in office sighed as they thought of the rapidity with which their terms had rolled around and wondered how they might stay in. The greater army of those who had been out of office, and for whom the time had dragged so slowly by, were wondering how to get in. To succeed in either case it was not necessary that men should have programs of reform and progress, or to have any real understanding of the theories of government, it was only necessary for them to say that they belonged to one or the other of two great parties into which the people had arbitrarily divided themselves, and to be able to control, somehow, other men in the casting of their votes.

There were, of course, two or three other parties, small and without hope of success, so that the men who belonged to them could honestly say what they thought, but it was not considered respectable or dignified to belong to any of these smaller parties, and the men who adhered to them were ridiculed and ostracized and made to feel ashamed.

Everywhere in Washington, where all depend in some way upon the Government, in the cloak rooms of the two houses of Congress, in the rotundas and lobbies of hotels, in the clubs and bar-rooms, in drawing rooms and parlors, and in the secret chambers of the White House itself, men talked of nothing but these national conventions. In Congress business was dragging. The usual daily sessions were held, and perfervid speeches were delivered, but there was no legislation, which was perhaps just as well. Both parties feared just then the possible effect legislation might have on the voters, and each sought to put the other in an unpopular attitude before the people. In a word, as the correspondents wrote in the lengthened specials they wired to their newspapers each night, the politicians at Washington were playing politics.

To Garwood, however, this life was full and satisfying. To saunter over to the House at noon, to saunter back, to lean at the corner of the little bar in the Arlington, one foot cocked over the other, his broad hat on the back of his head, and the Havana cigar between his teeth tilted at an angle parallel with the line of his hat brim, thus preserving to the eye the symmetry of the whole striking picture he knew he made--this was existence for him.

"You'll be on yoah state delegation to the national convention, I take it, suh?" Colonel Bird would say to him.

"Well," Garwood would reply, "I don't know yet whether I'll go on at large or not. It'll all depend on the situation when we get down to Springfield. Unless the boys feel that I could do more good somewhere else, I'll go on. Anyway, I'll go from the district."

"Well, you'll be theah, I'm suah, suh. Boy--make us anothah of those mint juleps. And, boy!--if you will allow me, suh----" the colonel bowed in his courtly old-school way to Garwood--"don't mash the mint this time, just pinch the sprigs, oah twis' them, so as to avoid the bittah flavah you othahwise impaht to yoah concoction. I find it ve'y difficult, Colonel," the old gentleman continued, turning to Garwood, "to get a julep made prope'ly out of Kentucky."

It pleased Garwood to be addressed as colonel, as it pleases any man, and he was conscious of a momentary regret that he had not induced Colonel Warfield to ask the governor of Illinois to appoint him as an aide-de-camp on his staff, so that the title might be his. He resolved to have that done if--but his mind darkened at the prospect of all he must suffer and endure before his political fortunes could again be considered secure. Another campaign with all its uncertainty lay before him, and there was no Rankin any more to lean on. He preferred to close his eyes to the future, and to live to the full the happy moments that flew by so swiftly.

The colonel had insisted on their seating themselves at one of the two or three small tables in the little bar-room, so that he might sip his julep in the lazy deliberation so dear to his Southern nature, and as they sat there, other members dropped in, and were invited by the colonel with a hospitable wave of his white hand to join them.

They were all glad to do so, for Colonel Bird represented one of those Kentucky districts dear to the congressional heart, which not only afforded a romantic background for his own picturesque figure, but possessed a higher attribute in this, that it always returned the colonel to Washington without contest or question. He was never troubled about renomination or reëlection. He had been speaking of that district for years--ever since he had accepted the benefits of the amnesty proclamation, which he affected to despise--with a calm proprietary air that filled the souls of the men gathered about him in the afternoon of this warm spring day, with a longing far above all the other longings of spring.

The colonel had laid off his planter's hat, and with his paunch pressed against the table, sat and tinkled the ice in his tall glass as if he loved its cool music, and awaited the serving of the others whom he had invited to become of his party. He sat erectly, as his paunch forced him to do, and now and then, in a way that added to his dignity, stroked the mustaches and imperial that were white as cotton against his red face. But his relief was apparent when at last the bartender brought the fragrant glasses with their cool crystal reflecting the green of the little sprigs of mint, and then he bowed, as well as he could, and formally awaited the pleasure of his guests.

"How!" said Ladd, of Colorado, in the big western voice that so heartily expressed the amenity that all felt due the occasion.

"Suhs," replied the colonel, "yoah ve'y good health."

The colonel took a long pull at the straw, and then straightening himself, sat, warm and red and pompous, the glossy bosom of his shirt arching itself to meet his imperial as though it would do its best to replace the starched frills that his antebellum personality lacked.

"Well, Colonel, whom are you Democrats going to nominate?" asked Van Beek, of New York.

"Well, suh," the colonel began, speaking gravely and with much consideration, as if he were indeed to deliver the judgment of his party's convention. "Pehsonally, I'd like to see a Southe'n gentleman, of cou'se. But that reminds me of an old friend of mine, who came down to see me 'long in the spring of seventy-six to ask that same question, suh. You all remembah that the' was a good deal of discussion goin' on in ouah pahty that yeah about ouah p'ospective candidate. The friend to whom I refeh was an old fellah who lived neah mah place, and he always came ovah to see me whenevah I got home f'om Washington, in o'deh to discuss the political issues of the day. I received him, and we sat down on the po'ch, and aftah I'd called mah house niggah to make us some juleps--I wish, suhs, we had those juleps heah to-day, though I do not wish to dispa'age the liquah ouah landlo'd se'ves heah, not at all, suhs." He inclined his head apologetically toward the bar. "I had known this old man fo' a long pe'iod of tahm. He was a po' fahmah, but--he rode in mah troop."

The colonel paused again, that the company might have time to appreciate the paternal relation of officer and man who had ridden with Morgan's Raiders, and then went on:

"I rehea'sed the names of seve'al of the distinguished gentlemen whose names had been brought fo'wahd by theah friends fo' the high office. The' was Tilden, and Seymoah, and Bayahd, and Thu'man, and othahs you'll remembuh, but none of them seemed somehow to impress the ol' fellah favo'ably. No, suh, none of the names seemed to impress the ol' fellah favo'ably, till at las', I added: 'And then, theah's some mention of Davis,' meaning the distinguished ju'ist of yoah state, suh," the colonel explained, bowing to Garwood, who, as if expressly deputed thereto by the governor of Illinois, bowed the acknowledgment that seemed to be due the honor thus conferred upon that commonwealth.

"At the magic name of Davis, the po' ol' man's eyes lit up with Promethean fiah," the colonel continued, his own little eyes sparkling, "and, leaning fo'wahd, trembling like an aspen leaf, with the delight he was almost afraid to indulge, he looked cahfully all about him, and took his long seegah from his lips, and then he whispehed: 'But, Colonel, ain't yo' all afeahed it's a _leetle_ airly?'

"And so, suhs," the colonel resumed, having bent his purple face to sip his julep and to give his companions opportunity to pay his story the tribute of the laugh he demanded, "I feah in this instance, suhs, it's a _leetle airly_ fo' a Southron.

"But, se'iously, suhs," the colonel went on, after a proper pause, "I'm goin' back to Kentucky the end of this month. I'll go ovah to Frankfo't, and I'll go to the Capitol Hotel, and theah I'll meet the friends of mah own state, and aftah that, I'll have some idea of whom I shall suppoht when we all get up to Chicago."

"Like to get over to Frankfort, don't you, Colonel?" asked Conley of Ohio, in the bald way that men had of inducing the colonel to talk about Kentucky.

"Well, suh, yes, suh, in a ce'tain sense I dew. It's ve'y pleasant to' a gentleman to meet all his old friends and comrades in ahms, as I do theah, but I will say this, suhs, that theah is at Frankfo't an aggregation of men who seemingly fo' ages have been hanging onto the public teat theah, suhs, and who, if the good Lawd would see fit to snatch them to his bosom, would be the subjects of a special dispensation of divahn Providence in which I could acquiesce, suhs, with an enthusiasm that would be tuhbulent and even riotous."

After this the colonel, feeling that politeness demanded the elimination of himself from his conversation, temporarily at least, turned to Garwood and said:

"Have you got a contes' on in yoah district this yeah, Colonel?"

"I always have had," said Garwood, and a sudden rueful expression overspread his countenance, "and I know no reason to expect any change in the ordinary routine this year."

"Well, suh. I wish I weh at liberty to go into yoah district this fall and make some speeches fo' you," said the colonel, with that naïve conceit of his which led him to feel that his presence would save the day for Garwood.

"If you could go out there _now_, with your gun, and in approved Kentucky style, kill off a few men I could name, I would like it almost as well," Garwood replied.

The colonel made no answer to this. But he looked a stern rebuke at Garwood, as at one who trifled with grave and serious matters.

They sat there and drank and listened to the colonel's stories until the evening came, until the night itself had fallen. And then Garwood received Pusey's telegram, and it smote him dumb in the middle of a laugh. He had only time to ask Colonel Bird to request a leave of absence for him, before he hurried away to pack his bag. The colonel was delighted, of course, to have the opportunity to act for a friend in any matter. In fact, nothing could please him more than to be enabled to rise in his place in the House in all that morning dignity which no dissipation of the previous night could impair, and address the Speaker. And it may have been merely to show his appreciation of the confidence thus reposed in him, that he went with Garwood to see him safely aboard his train, on which he was to speed westward, with troubled mind, through the mountains and over the plains, out to Illinois.

VII

Garwood's train, like most trains that go through Grand Prairie, was late that evening, and the white twilight upon which Emily had depended for protection as she waited at the station, had deepened to a gloom that almost absorbed her little figure, clad in the black of her mourning garb, though the little toque and jacket she wore were of a vernal fashion that lent a smartness to her attire. She had determined to spend the half hour she had to wait beyond the moment scheduled for the train's arrival, in fancying herself again in her husband's arms, and in imagining his joy at being once more at home with her, but the memories of her last visit to this station on that rainy December night long ago, when she had reached home from her broken visit to Washington, would crowd in upon her, and torture her, setting in train thoughts that assailed her resolute cheerfulness.

The station agent had begun by energetically chalking on the blackboard that was nailed under the wide eaves of the little chalet that did for a station, the number of minutes the train was late. When that time fled by, and the train did not come, he rubbed out his first figures and chalked in others; when the minutes these inadequately symboled had gone by like the rest, he gave over the effort and flatly told Emily, with a helpless gesture that spoke his refusal to be any longer responsible, that he did not know when the train would come. He glanced at the lights on his semaphore, and then shut himself into his little ticket office, where the telegraph instrument, ticking feverishly away, indicated some remaining spark of life in the railroad's system.

Emily had been worrying for some time about all the possible things that might happen to the baby during her absence. She had been worrying about the dinner she had ordered in place of their usual supper, but that, she was sure, had long ago grown cold, and was beyond reach even of a woman's worry.

The train came at last, when every one about the station had collapsed into an attitude of having given it up entirely, and Emily forgot her long wait in the joy with which she rushed forth to greet her husband. She saw his big figure emerging from the last coach on the train. His hat was pulled down to his brows, and he looked out upon the desolate scene that the little station presents to the traveler who enters Grand Prairie by that road, with the crossness of a passenger whose train with almost human perversity had been losing time ever since it started. When he saw Emily he did not quicken his pace, though he walked on in her direction, with a long face that told her he was entitled to her pity and sympathy for all that he had to endure in life. She ran toward him, and he bent his head that she might embrace his neck and kiss him. She clung there an instant, and when she released him his eyes were searching the barren platform.

"Nobody else here?" he asked.

"Why, no, dear--who would----"

"Isn't Pusey here?"

"Pusey?" she repeated, in surprise. But Garwood made no answer. He was thinking of the old days when he was always met by Rankin, and usually by half a dozen of Rankin's followers gathered together to give _éclat_ to the congressman's home-coming. But now there was no one to meet him but Emily.

He insisted upon a carriage to be driven home in, saying the ride from Olney in the common coach had nearly killed him, and when, above the rattle of the old hack's windows, Emily said:

"I'm so glad to have you home again," her last words somehow expressed the whole situation against which his nature was in revolt, and he cried out:

"Yes, home again! Nice time to be called away from Washington! What are they all trying to do here now, do you know?"

"They seem," Emily replied, "to be trying to defeat you for a third term."

"Well, I sometimes wish they'd succeed," said Garwood; "sometimes I get sick of this whole business of politics, and wish----"

Emily was sitting upright, her face turned away from him in her disappointment.

"So do I," she acquiesced, in a low voice.

"Well," Garwood growled, as if she and not he himself had suggested the very disaster which of all others he most feared, "they won't beat me this time, I'll tell 'em that. I reckon Jim Rankin's at the bottom of it all."

VIII

The curtains were drawn at the windows of Garwood's law office that night, but the thin lip of light that outlined the casement told to belated men in Grand Prairie that a conference was going on within. The primaries were but two days off, and a vague uncertain quality in the rays that straggled into the gloom and lightened the rusty gilt letters of Garwood's sign, creaking as it had done for so many years in the wind, might have hinted to the imaginative something of the straits in which the little council gathered within found itself.

Had such a one been acquainted with politics in that prairie district, and had seen Jim Rankin pass by at midnight under the trees that swayed the thick black shadows of their foliage dizzily to and fro on the wide stone sidewalk, and noted the curious smile that glimmered an instant on Rankin's face, when from force of old habit he raised an upward glance, he would have concluded that serious obstacles beset the way of Jerome B. Garwood in that career to which as a man of destiny he had believed himself ordained, and from which the inconstant and ever-changing circle of his friends had expected so much.

Garwood had come home to find his political condition desperate. He himself, out of the anger that showed black in his face during those hot and trying days, described the situation as a revolt and, had he been possessed of the power, would gladly have punished the rebels by such stern repressive measures as autocratic governments employ in the terror their inherent weakness inspires.

Amid the spring delights of Washington public life he had become swollen with new ambitions. He not only wished to be renominated for Congress, but he wished also to be placed at the head of the Polk County delegation to the state convention called to meet in Springfield early in June; and beyond this, he had the higher wish to be sent as delegate to the national convention at Chicago. He would have preferred, of course, to be named as one of the Big Four delegates at large from Illinois, and when his imagination had been more warmly stimulated by Colonel Bird's mint juleps, he had dramatized himself as electrifying the national convention by some fine extemporaneous flight of oratory, in which he should soar in an instant to the pinnacle of a national fame, and from that rare altitude behold new and illimitable possibilities of political future. It was, therefore, with a shock of disappointment to which he had not the power to reconcile himself that he had obeyed Pusey's urgent telegram and had come home to find his very political existence at stake.

Sprague, reviled and reproached as a perennial candidate by those in the district who were themselves perennial candidates, was once more in the field seeking congressional honors. His county, Moultrie, had held its convention, and once more instructed its fifteen delegates for him. Over in Logan, General Barrett, having had a glimpse of the promised land at the Pekin convention, had so far departed from the reserve and dignity of his eminent respectability as to have himself declared a candidate, and he had been indorsed by his county. These candidatures did not seriously alarm Garwood, but a new complication had been suddenly added to the situation of such grave portent that he had summoned about him those who, having received government offices of varying degrees of importance, still felt themselves bound to his support.

This night, then, they were gathered in the office where Enright now spent his days in the midst of a law practice so immature and modest that it could not keep the dust off the books that were piled all about. Pusey was there and Hale had hurried over from Pekin on receipt of a telegram from Garwood. Beside these were Kellogg, whom Garwood had succeeded in placing in the office of the secretary of state at Springfield, and Crawford, his private secretary. They were ranged on chairs uniformly tilted against the wall of the little private office, and the air was streaked with the customary clouds of tobacco smoke that indicate a political fire.

Hale lowered his chair to the floor, and bent over with his elbows on his knees, his head hanging and his face hidden. The others in the room, except Pusey, who was as indifferent as ever, had transfixed him with accusing eyes, though any one could have told that their attitude was feigned in order to keep in sympathy with the threatening mood of Garwood, who sat at his desk, and glowered at the Pekin postmaster.

"Why don't you speak?" demanded Garwood presently, as if Hale had been arraigned upon an indictment, and they were waiting for him to enter a plea.

Hale stirred uneasily, but he did not speak.

"My God!" said Garwood, petulantly, "I don't see why you couldn't have held Tazewell, anyhow!"

"Well, I'll tell you, Mr. Garwood," said Hale, at length, breaking under the pressure of all those accusing stares, "you see, it's like this. The people over our way are sore on the president, they're down on the administration----"

"Oh, hell!" cried Garwood, striking his desk in disgust, "I don't give a damn for what the people think about the president, or the administration. I ain't the president, nor the administration, either."

"But they think you're supportin' the administration--course,"--Hale hastened to disclaim any individual responsibility for so serious a charge--"I'm only tellin' you what they say."

"Well, didn't any of them read my speech the other day? Does that look as if I'm supporting the administration?"

Hale had no reply to make to this argument. He only heaved his heavy shoulders in something that approximated a shrug.

"When was Bailey over there?" Garwood demanded.

"Oh, he's been over off an' on for a month."

"Then why in hell didn't you write me!" said Garwood, turning angrily in his chair. His eyes blazed at Hale a moment, and then he tossed his head and looked away in utter disgust.

Hale had thrown him a glance that in its turn had some of the anger that was beginning to show in his reddening face, and he replied:

"Well, I didn't know it, that's why. You can't get on to Zeph Bailey; he wades in the water, he does."

Hale breathed hard, and no one had an answer ready. They all knew Bailey's mysterious habits, and Hale's explanation was sufficient to acquit him in the forum of their minds. Hale sensed instantly a new and defensive quality in the atmosphere; a current of sympathy seemed to set in toward him, and he kept on, feeling his advantage.

"Why didn't any of the rest of you wise guys get on to him when he come over and started to fix things right here in Polk County?"

And they had no answer for that. Garwood, sweeping the circle with a glance, and fearing a division in his own ranks, forced a smile of conciliation, and said:

"Oh, well, if Bailey's a candidate, we'll have to fight him, that's all. It's only one more, anyway, and----"

But the menace of Bailey's candidacy had cast upon his spirits a shadow too dense to be lightened by mere words, and his sentence died with the confident air he had been able for a moment to command. Hale, however, had been mollified, and took Garwood's manner from him, as he straightened up to say:

"Course, we'll make a fight for it. You've got some friends left in Tazewell, and so have I, and if we're licked, we'll die with our boots on, that's all there is to that."

"He has his own county, of course. And you say he has men at work up in DeWitt. Now, if he gets Tazewell and Polk--well----" Garwood flung out his hands hopelessly, as if to surrender. "Great guns, what's the use?"

"And Sprague'll throw Moultrie to him--that's fixed. Sprague knows he can't get it; he's just been acting as a stalking horse for Bailey," said Kellogg, anxious to bear his part in this conference, even if he could bring nothing cheerful to it.

"How did he ever get on the blind side of Sprague?" queried Garwood, peevishly.

"Oh, legislature," said Kellogg, proud to be able to show his knowledge of affairs in the state house at Springfield; "he put some of Sprague's fellows--Simp Lewis and some more of 'em--on the pay roll, and took care of brother-in-law Wilson when he made up the committees."

"H-m-m-m," Garwood mused, "Mason and Moultrie, and DeWitt--if he gets Tazewell or Polk now--I don't know what you gentlemen think about it, but it looks to me as if he had us pretty nearly skinned."

What they thought of it was not apparent, for none of them spoke, and silence settled over the little room, where Garwood's ambitions were trembling in the fateful balance. At last Pusey spoke:

"He hasn't got Polk _yet_."

Something of the determination which the little man had put into his tone affected the others, and they looked up with new smiles. A reaction set in and Garwood glanced at Pusey gratefully.

"Yes," he said, trying to resume his congressional dignity, with a smile that was intended to take from it its suggestion of distance, "you remember what the devil said:

"'--let us Consult how we may henceforth most offend Our enemy; our own loss how repair; How overcome this dire calamity; What reinforcement we may gain from hope; If not, what resolution from despair.'"

They stared at him in amazement, wondering how it was possible for him to know what the devil had said, all except Pusey, who nodded appreciatively, to show his own relation to the world of letters. And then Hale drew a long breath and threw back his shoulders.

"Of course," he said, "if we can carry the primaries here in Polk, that will help us to win out over in my county. Can you do it?"

"How about Jim Rankin?" blurted out the tactless, maladroit Kellogg. The name cast a chill over the little gathering just as the new cheer was warming it, and they were all vicariously embarrassed by what, just at that time, amounted to a _contretemps_. If Rankin himself, passing by outside at that very moment, could have seen the expressive glances that were secretly exchanged before they all yielded to the impulse to fix unitedly on Garwood's face, he would have had a sensation to gladden him during all his homeward way. But Garwood met the situation with real dignity.

"Well, Jim will be against me, of course."

They might have demurred out of mere politeness, but Garwood added:

"And I can assure you, gentlemen, he is an antagonist not to be despised."

The mention of Rankin's name, however, had the final effect of forcing them to seek some positive means of dealing with the situation, and after the preliminary waste of time common to most conferences, they began at last to plan for the coming primaries. They were at it a long while, and when in the chill, ghastly hours of the early morning they separated, Garwood voiced what was doubtless in the hearts of all of them, when he said to Pusey:

"Remember, we have Jim Rankin to fight, Pusey."

Pusey switched his little eyes toward Garwood, but Garwood did not see them. He was thinking of other days.

IX

Garwood awoke after a few hours of restless sleep, snatched a hurried breakfast, seized his hat and was going away without a word, when Emily followed him through the hall and to the door, and with nervousness and suspense showing in her concentrated brows she looked up at him and said:

"I'll be glad when this day's over."

"So'll I," he rejoined, and then, though he had stepped on the veranda, he turned again. A sudden tenderness, springing from the need of support and sympathy he himself felt that day, overflowed his heart, and he pressed his fingers to her brow and touched the wrinkles.

"I don't like to see those there," he said, and as if in instant response to his whim, her smile smoothed them away.

"You'll send me word, Jerome, won't you?" she said, "the babies and I'll be watching and waiting, you know. Oh, I _wish_ we could help!"

He smiled his old smile at her loyalty.

"Good by," he said; "I'll keep you posted." And he ran down the steps. The rain was slanting down to make an ideal primary day, and Garwood was glad of the waiting carriage which, in the extravagance a man can always justify to himself in the midst of a campaign, he had ordered the night before. Emily watched him drive away, down the streaming street. Once he turned and looked back through the window at her, or she thought he did, and she waved her hand.

Then all the morning long she went about the house with the memory of his kiss upon her lips, and she sang at times, though her heart would forever leap into her throat when she thought of the bitter contest going on in the rain that was falling upon the green fields of Polk County. The rain fell steadily in the gloom with an impressiveness that would remind her of the silent fate which that day was deciding Jerome's future and her own.

She felt as if she were passing through a crisis in her life. She found it impossible to apply herself steadily to any one of the futile little tasks that are always awaiting the hand of the housewife, but wandered aimlessly about, unable to rest, unable to work, unable to do anything until she knew the event of that day. She had found a new faith in Jerome with the kiss he had given her at parting, and she lived over and over again that one last moment when he had smiled down into her eyes with the expression she remembered of other days. That moment and that kiss were enough to blot out all the years of her loneliness and renunciation, and as those years faded from her view she could look forward now with a new hope and a new confidence to the happier days she felt must come when this last battle had been fought. For she felt it would be the last battle; she determined that it must be the last battle; she could not endure the strain and suspense of another, and her soul's sincere desire took the romantic form of a prayer that Jerome return to her bearing his shield or being borne upon it.

The rain had come with a thunder storm early in the morning, but as the day advanced the temperature lowered and a cold, raw wind blowing from the west lashed out the last of the warm weather they had been having all over central Illinois. The hope of the spring seemed suddenly gone; the day, indeed, might have belonged to that dreary season of the fall, when gray clouds hang low and children long for the darkness that will bring the needed cheer of early lamp-light.

The streets were silent and deserted. Now and then, perhaps some grocer's wagon would lurch along, its driver slapping the streaming rubber blanket on his horse's back with his wet reins, and sometimes one of the town's tattered old hacks would rattle by. Here and there, near some cobbler's shanty, or by the door of a little barber shop, ward workers huddled in shivering groups, and every little while men drove out of town in buggies or buckboards, to look after the caucuses that were to be held that afternoon in the townships; but the people themselves, as their habit ever was, in Grand Prairie, evinced little interest in the political contest at this critical stage of its development, and seemed to be indoors waiting for the rain to cease.

Yet a great battle was raging in Grand Prairie that day, and Garwood's law offices were once more serving as political headquarters. All morning long the crowd of workers whom he had enrolled in his new organization thronged the outer office, each of them wishing to seize Garwood a moment for himself, as if his suggestion, or his complaint, or the news he bore was such that Garwood himself alone should hear it.

Their clothes were soaked with the rain, their wet boots tracked the floor with mud, their umbrellas trickled little streams of dirty water. The air, already saturated with heavy moisture and foggy with the smoke of tobacco, which does for the smoke of battle in these political contests, was foul with the fumes of beer and whisky, while the whiff of an onion now and then brought to mind the long saloon of Chris Steisfloss below where the pink mosquito-netting had been removed for that day from the free-lunch table.

In his private office, his rumpled hair falling to his haggard eyes, his cravat untied, his long coat tails gathered behind the hands that were thrust deep in his trousers' pockets, Garwood strode back and forth silent and savage, chewing the cigar that smoked away in the corner of his mouth. Pusey was with him, tapping in and out of the room, and so was Hale. Hale had been there all morning, for, having no acquaintance in Grand Prairie, he could do nothing outside, and so he sat, feeling that his stolid, imponderable presence must somehow be a comfort to Garwood. And, besides, he did not know how he could decently get away.

Garwood spoke to neither of them; but walked the floor and rolled his cigar round and round in his mouth, spitting out pieces of it now and then savagely. Once at the end of the beat he was pacing he paused by the revolving bookcase in which he had kept his working library, the books he had needed at his elbow when he was digging into the law. These books, because of that rapid displacement which goes on in law libraries, so swiftly do the appellate courts grind out new decisions, were now out of date; the statutes were two sessions behind the Legislature, the digest had been superseded by a new edition, the last six numbers of his set of the reports were missing.

But he did not observe these things--a little volume had caught his eye, and he picked it up, blew the dust from it, and opened it. And as his glance fell on its pages, its well-read remembered pages, his face softened and there passed across its darkness the faint reflection of a smile. It was not a law book, for Garwood held it tenderly in his hand, as though he loved it, and men do not learn to love law books. It was a little leather covered copy of Epictetus, with the imprint of a London publisher on its title page, one that Emily had given him, and he had read it through and through, and it bore many loving marks on its margins.

It had lain there on that bookcase, possibly untouched, certainly unopened for years. He must have tossed it down there before his first campaign--how long ago that seemed! He turned over the pages and here and there he saw a marked passage, words that once had thrilled him, more than that, words that had comforted him, but now they were cold and dead, they no longer had any meaning or any message for him; he wondered for a moment why it was so. But his mind could not long desert its hard pressed post that day, and if for an instant he yearned for some of the peace of the days that little book somehow stood for, he tossed it back where it had lain so long, brushed his fingers together to fleck the dust from them, and resumed his pacing.

Noon came, the clock in the high school tower struck, the bell in the fire engine house tapped, the whistle at the woolen mills blew. The outer office was deserted, Pusey had left an hour before, and when Crawford and Hale suggested luncheon to Garwood, he shook his head so petulantly that they were glad enough to go out and leave him alone. When they had gone, he sank into his chair, sprawled his long legs out before him, and sat there scowling darkly.

He sat there a long while, but finally he roused, got up, opened the ugly walnut cupboard in his room, drew out a bottle and a glass and poured out for himself a generous draft of whisky. He drank the stuff without water, raw, and when he had taken advantage of his brief seclusion to light a cigarette, inhaling its smoke eagerly, he began to pace the floor again. Two or three times after that he stopped by the cupboard and took the bottle down; at last he did not put it back in its hiding place, but set it out openly on his desk. Now, the times he passed it without drinking were growing fewer and fewer.

Hale was the first to return. Garwood had just halted by his desk and poured himself another drink, and he stood with his hand still on the bottle when Hale burst into the room. The man's face plainly foreboded evil tidings, and he stood and stared at Garwood without speaking, as if he disliked to tell him what was on his tongue. Garwood had raised the glass, but with it at his lips he stopped and looked up to say:

"What in hell's the matter with you, Hale; are you drunk or crazy, or have you seen a ghost?"

"I've seen--Bailey."

"Bailey!" Garwood slowly lowered the glass to the desk, as if Hale had seen something more than a ghost.

"Yes."

"Out on--what's that long street? He was with Rankin, goin' west."

"Over to the woolen mills?" Garwood asked.

"I suppose so," said Hale. "You see, after Crawford and I'd got a bite to eat over at that restaurant on the other side of the square--what's the name of it?"

"Oh, damn the name!" exclaimed Garwood. "Go on."

"Well, anyways, after that I went out to try an' do somethin', but about all I could do was to hire 'bout half a dozen hobos who were goin' through from Chicago, and I was takin' them down to Enright so's he could vote 'em at all the prim'ries, you know, and I happened to look up--and there I see Bailey."

"What was he doing, did you say?" asked Garwood with the morbid fascination the recital of some painful fact has for the one it most concerns.

"Oh, he was just moseyin' along the street with Rankin, you know that slow, splay-footed, knock-kneed way he has of walking, don't you? Oh--there's no doubt it's him!"

Garwood slowly swallowed his drink, and had just turned to speak again, when Pusey entered.

"Did you know Bailey's here?" he demanded.

Pusey walked straight to the desk, and he had lifted the bottle before he replied:

"Yes."

"When did you hear?" Garwood asked.

"Just now. I repaired here instantly to apprise you."

"You did!" said Garwood. "Well, where in hell are you going to repair to next to do something about it? Where did _you_ see him?"

"I saw him at the Cassell House, and Rankin--"

"Yes--Rankin," said Garwood. He ceased to give attention to Pusey, since the climax of his tale was already too fully known, but repeated Rankin's name in a reminiscent tone not unlikely to inspire pleasure in the breast of Rankin's successor, as if one should sigh for a first wife in the presence of the second. "Jim Rankin," he repeated, "that's the worst of it."

"You miss Rankin, heh?" piped Pusey, squinting at the drink he was pouring.

Garwood turned on him then, and shouted angrily:

"Yes, damn you, I do! If he were here now he'd have a suggestion; he'd have some resources. What have _you_ to offer?"

Pusey lifted the glass and even turned deliberately to hold it more in range with the window, so that the light could stream through it and bring out the rich, warm colors of the liquor. And then, carefully tilting the drink into his gullet, he put the glass down, sucked his mustache into his mouth to get the last lingering taste of the whisky, and said:

"Buy him."

"Who?" said Garwood.

"Rankin."

Garwood took an impetuous step toward Pusey, and then halting suddenly he stared at him in utter amazement. Hale turned on the little editor a look no less startled, but quickly glanced around at Garwood to see what he would do. The anger that had flushed Garwood's face slowly died out of it, and his lips began to curl into a mordant smile that slowly took on in turn the qualities of contempt and pity.

"Pusey," he said, not at all in the tone that Hale had expected to hear break from him, "Pusey," he said, "don't be foolish."

"Foolish?" repeated Pusey seriously. "Is it so foolish, think you?"

"Damnably foolish," Garwood replied.

"Pardon me," Pusey said, "you evidently misunderstood me."

"Misunderstood you? Didn't you suggest buying Jim Rankin? You evidently don't know men."

"Did I say Jim Rankin?" answered Pusey. "If I did, I meant Jim Rankin's men."

"Oh," Garwood and Hale exclaimed together in a weak, unconvinced note. Garwood looked at Pusey more charitably, and Pusey returned the look by one of subtlest meaning. Thus they stood and gazed at each other for a whole minute, that seemed, in the stillness that dripped into the room, a whole age.

It was, in the end, Hale who spoke.

"We'll have to do something, turn some sort of a trick, and do it quick. Zeph Bailey ain't here for nothing!"

Hale had drawn his watch from his pocket.

"What time is it?" Garwood asked.

Hale looked at his watch again.

"Two-thirty," he replied. He had once been a railroader.

"The bank closes at four," said Garwood. He began slowly and hesitatingly to button his waistcoat, and as though to occupy some irresolute moment that awaited the formation of big issues, he poured himself another drink, and gulped it, making a wry face. Another moment passed while the two men stood narrowly watching him.

"The polls close at seven, don't they?" he asked.

"Don't know but they do," replied Pusey.

Then Garwood, with the firmness of a final decision, put his hat on his head.

"You wait here," he said.

Then he bolted from the room.

X

The old ramshackle hack that had made its stand in front of the Cassell House so long that it had acquired the status of a local institution, was tearing furiously out Sangamon Avenue. The appearance of this ancient vehicle outside its proper habitat, usually betokened some emergency; and when Emily, with an ear keen for omens that day, heard the rattle of its rheumatic joints far down the street, and when she saw it verify her impression of disaster by turning in at the carriage gate and rolling up under the dripping trees, she flew to the door with her face as white as if she had seen a messenger boy coming with a telegram.

When she saw the door of the hack burst open before the hack itself could come to a stop, and Jerome imperil his bones by leaping out between its wheels, she was relieved to have him whole and sound before her eyes, for she had half expected to see his limp form borne in by careful attendants. Her fears were partly realized when she saw his gray face and the blue circles that lay under his eyes, and they were expressed in the breathless voice in which she exclaimed, as he leaped up the steps:

"Jerome! What is it!"

"Come in here--quick," he said. She followed him at speed, imploring him to confess that he was ill. He did not answer, but led the way in hot haste to the sitting room, and then across that to Emily's little writing desk, which stood open in the bay window. She watched him in wonderment as he fumbled in the breast of his coat and produced at last a paper, which, rustling forth, he spread before her on the desk. Then he seized a pen, plunged it in the ink, and pushing her into the chair he had dragged up to the desk, he said:

"Here Em--sign this--quick!"

She looked at him in amazement that each moment widened her eyes the more; looked at him and then looked at the paper he held to the leaf of her desk with a trembling finger. She took the pen mechanically.

"Here," he said, jerking out his words; "right there--under my name. You're to sign with me."

She noted the blaze in his eyes; the odor of tobacco and liquor he exhaled oppressed her; she looked from him to the paper on the desk, then back to him again. In her bewilderment she gasped:

"Why--what is it for?"

"Oh, it's a note!" he said, crossly, while his brows gathered in his impatience. "Sign it, quick! I haven't a minute to lose! I'll explain it to you afterward."

She looked again into his brilliant eyes, she felt his tainted breath upon her face, then something of his own fever of haste caused her heart to leap, and she put her name to the note below where Jerome had scrawled his own. Garwood snatched up the note and thrust it back in his pocket. Then he turned to go. But Emily arose and caught at him.

"Jerome! Dear! What is it! What has happened? What is it for?"

The tumult of his troubled soul broke forth and he poured it out upon her.

"It's for money--money--money!" he cried, and he smote the unstable little desk with his fist, making it rock. "What is everything for in these days!" His breath came hard and fast, the blue crescents in which his eyes burned deepened perceptibly, and his eyes flamed as if all the fires of all excitement were about to leap out. In his cheeks, now of an unusual pallor, two red spots glowed.

"But what is the money for?" she persisted, still clinging to him as he backed away from her. "Tell me--won't you?"

"It's for votes--votes--votes! Votes that I need more to-day than I ever needed them!"

"Oh, Jerome!" she cried. "Don't--don't say that, don't talk that way! Wait--wait, dear, sit down until you're calmer."

"Calmer!" he roared. "Calmer! With all my enemies at my heels?"

"But, dear, I don't like the sound of that. It would be better if you were beaten honorably."

"Honorably!" he sneered. "Honorably! Do you know what it would mean to me to be beaten now? Do you know what it would mean to _you_! Do you want to go to the poor-house?"

He stopped in his mad rush of words and flung out his jaw at her pugnaciously.

Emily stood trying to hold her husband's wild, unsteady eyes in her own gaze for a moment.

"Why, Jerome," she said in low, even accents, "it would be as bad as--as--as that story they told of you in your first campaign!"

His face without relaxing took on the mockery of a smile, then he laughed harshly. The tone of the laugh shuddered through Emily. She had released her hold on him, and now she took a step backward. Her lips were parted and at last she spoke, her words coming reluctantly from her throat. It was scarcely above a whisper that she said:

"Was that all--true?"

She saw the conviction in his eyes before it came to its verification on his lips. He laughed again, the same harsh laugh as before.

"True!" he cried. "Of course it was true, you poor little fool!"

The words brought a cry from her, and, clasping her hands before her face, she turned and sank into the chair and put her head down on the desk.

Garwood stared at her awhile, then took a step toward her. He drew nearer and bent over her, tried to draw her at last up into his arms.

"Emily!" he said. "Don't--it's all--I was--I was--crazy--"

Her head shook slowly from side to side.

"Go away," she said. "Go away--oh, please go away!"

She burst into tears, and relinquishing his hold of her he drew himself up, swayed an instant, steadied himself by the desk, and then said:

"All right, then, I'll go."

And he left the room and the house, trying to reclaim his dignity with the erectness with which he took his careful steps down from the veranda and to the waiting carriage. Then Emily heard the hack roll away.

XI

Emily leaned at evening against the casement of the western window in her room upstairs. The rain had ceased, and though the clouds were still as gray and cold as stone, the air was becoming luminous, and from somewhere had received a new inspiration, fresh and pure and light. As she gazed listlessly away across the vacant lots that lay beyond her home, she saw, along the rounded tree tops and the chimneyed roofs that made for her the western sky line, that the blanket of cloud was slowly rolling back upon itself, until at last it revealed a long, thin strip of open sky, clear and blue as some remembered stretch of summer sea. In the middle of this, far over on the west side of the town, the low square tower, built like an Italian belvedere on the Ursuline Sisters' Convent, was silhouetted, and below and all around, the masses of foliage became vivid green in the new light that fell upon them.

As all the world about shrank in the shades of the coming night, the clouds deepened to a purple, and in the slow and silent changes that went constantly forward, their edges above were softly tinged with ashes of roses, while below, the reflected green of the trees changed their drab to pink. Then there was traced for her a long, wavy thread of glistening silver, the billowed top of some white cloud floating deep in the illimitable distances behind that opening in the sky. And then suddenly, the sun sinking into this proscenium illumined its infinite and glorious vistas with a flood of golden light.

But it was all subconsciously that this woman followed the varying shades and tones of color in the sunset of grays and golds, and if by a strangely divided intelligence she noted the physical changes that were being wrought in the world outside her, her thoughts within surged in a great ocean, of feeling against the cold and desolate shore that now bounded life for her. Otherwise, as she stood there at the close of this fateful day, and saw the gold grow brighter and the pink deepen to crimson, she might easily have worked out a poetic analogy between that little sunset, with the convent tower to give it gloom, and her own life; she would have done so once, and found a sweet exquisite sadness in it, but now--a grief at last had come to her too real and too tragic in its great reality for any such romanticism, a grief that sounded deeper than any tears.

Other griefs could be borne; they could be voiced; they could find comfort in the ministrations of sympathetic friends, in the consolations of religion; more than all in the healing balm that nature stores in the woods and fields. But here was a grief that was the more intense because she had so long dreaded it, known it even, though she had fought the recognition off, and never admitted it to herself before. She saw all that now, and it made clear so many little passages in her later life; passages that had been dark to her, and filled with vague troubles.

Here was a grief that was no new thing, but an old thing, that had been there all the time, like some fatal disease; she had felt its pains and it had put its restraints and its limitations and its renunciations upon her; now it had been correctly diagnosed at last, that was all; and it could not be changed, nor cured, nor alleviated even; but she must bear it alone and in silence, walking straight-lipped and dry-eyed the long way that stretched before.

In some such mode as this her thoughts had been rushing on ever since that moment downstairs in the afternoon when the whole truth had been at last revealed to her. She had thought it out along every line she could trace; she had analyzed and synthesized; she had viewed it from every possible standpoint; she had built up elaborate schemes of repair, of rehabilitation; she had planned a new life to be begun when the wreck of the old had been cleared away by forgiveness and new resolve; but in the end, it had all come to the same remorseless conviction--her faith had been destroyed, it lay dead at her feet; nothing could ever change that fact any more.

The colors were slowly dying out of the narrow strip of sky along the horizon and it had become opalescent and serene with evening. A new life seemed suddenly to awake in the world below her. A robin, that should have been in bed, went springing across the yard, swelling its red breast, and Emily was vaguely conscious of wondering if it were the one she had heard that afternoon singing in the rain. Something moved her to raise the window, something in the new and vital pulse that thrilled the world.

With the inrushing air came the sickening odor of the late-flowering locust tree, and there were borne to her as well the gentle sounds of evening, the endless trilling of insects in the wet grass; the lowing of a cow; by and by the belated crow of some rooster. The world was alive and awake; it seemed to be stretching itself after its long prostration in the rain, and now it enjoyed this breath of keen air before it went to sleep, impatient for the hopeful morning when it might take up once more its glad ambitious life. But for her--so Emily's thoughts ran--there was no hope and no to-morrow.

The sun had trailed the last of his splendors across that narrow opening in the sky. The opalescence swam into a new sea of silver, then suddenly a bar of yellow broke it, there was a rush of violet, then purple shadows dissolved the convent tower and the sky closed, cold and dark and still. And there came into Emily's mind the lines:

"Life's night begins: let him never come back to us! There would be doubt, hesitation, and pain. Forced praise on our part--the glimmer of twilight, Never glad confident morning again!"

She closed her window and turned wearily away. She had her duties, her little duties; John Ethan was calling, and the supper was to be laid; life somehow after all must be lived.

She was going down the stairs, when suddenly from the little habits of existence that persist sometimes ludicrously, sometimes irritatingly, sometimes comfortingly, even in the most tragic moments of life, she thought of the evening papers lying at that moment damp and limp against the front door. The primaries--she stopped and steadied herself by the baluster--what had been the result of the primaries? She shook her head impatiently for thinking of them in that moment. What were primaries to her now? And yet--would he win?

She went on down the stairs, she found the papers, and now when the truth could no longer be hidden, or distorted to any one's advantage, they printed the truth at last--none could tell the result at that hour; it was the hardest political battle ever waged in Polk County, and on it hung the political future of Jerome B. Garwood.

Something of the old excitement came back to her for a moment. He was there in the thick of it, fighting hard; he was desperate; he had risked all again for that political future--she stopped herself with a gasp--if, indeed, his future alone were all that was involved! To her it was his past that was involved; his past that meant more than all to her now. He had, indeed, risked all upon this battle, and all had been lost before the battle was begun!

She ate her lonely supper, she put her babies to bed, she prolonged all her evening duties that they might fill up her thoughts and the slow hours. Each sound, each foot-fall on the sidewalk startled her, and yet no one came. The evening passed. At last she went to bed, but all the noises of the night alarmed her, and in the darkness the burden of her thoughts became insupportable.

At last she got up and went to the window that gave a view of Sangamon Avenue and stood there watching and listening. She went back to bed, but sleep was far from her that night and time and time again she rose and went to her window. Finally, she wrapped herself in a shawl and huddled on the floor at the low sill, and still watched and listened. The night went by, hour after hour. Now and then she heard the baby sighing in his sleep--the poor little baby--and she straightened up, a dim, rigid, attentive figure there in the darkness. Once when the elder child awoke, sleepily calling for a drink, she went to him, but she could not stay; she came back again and resumed her lonely vigil.

And still the hours went by. The low night brooded over the slumbering town. Far down that black and silent street, its shapes distorted and unfamiliar in the shadows, she knew that his fate had been decided. The early hours of the morning brought their chill, and she shrugged herself more closely in her shawl, clutched it more tightly to her breast. And there in the window, alone, she watched and waited while the night grew old and waned.

XII

The crowd of men that filled Chris Steisfloss's saloon were not reckoning the time that night. They pressed, as many of them as could, against the bar, and those who were huddled behind this front rank stretched their arms between the brushing shoulders for the glasses that Chris himself and his bartender, both on duty, made haste to fill each time some voice shouted an order for drink. The long bar-room was stifling, and the gas jets flared sickly, uncertainly, in their efforts to keep alive in an atmosphere from which the oxygen was so quickly exhausted.

Above the tilted hats of the gathering a cloud of smoke drifted in thin, gray currents along the low ceiling, following the drafts that puffed aimlessly whenever the outer door opened, and let the cool night air rush in with its sane and sanitary freshness. Over all, as though a part of the low hanging cloud of smoke, as though an element of the feculent atmosphere, hung almost palpably the mass of oaths and epithets, disjointed words and empty phrases that were poured out in a mad débâcle by all those excited voices. To this were added the scrape and shuffle of boots, moving unsteadily on the floor, and the click of glasses as these men pledged anew a cause which by all the defiance of their angry tones was evidently lost.

In the midst of them all, with his broad back leaning against the rail that guarded the bar, was Garwood himself. His rumpled shirt was open at the throat, his cravat was gone, his soiled cuffs had come unlinked and he fittingly portrayed in his whole appearance the utter rout and demoralization which had that day overtaken his political faction. His eyes blazed now with the confused emotions that ran riot in his soul, and now they lost all their luster and seemed to be set in a filmy stare, until their swollen lids fell heavily over them, to be raised again only by an effort.

He had laid his hat down on the bar, where its brim, flattening to the walnut surface, was soaking up the liquor that had been spilled from an overturned glass. In a strange whim of his disordered mind he had commanded every one to let the hat lie where it was, and they had all obeyed, with the seriousness of drinking men. And there it reposed, all its grace and expression gone, strangely typifying the wreck of its wearer's fortunes.

As Garwood stood there, his black hair matted to his brow, his cheeks and chin blue with a long day's growth of the stubble of his beard, he suddenly flung over his shoulder a peremptory order to Steisfloss to fill the glasses again, and when the saloon-keeper pushed the tall bottle toward him, he turned half around and splashed a drink out of it with an unsteady hand. Then holding the little tumbler in a precarious grasp, he faced about again and with elbows resting on the bar behind him, he broke forth in a thick voice:

"Don't you think I'm beaten! Don't you think it, I tell you! I may be beaten _now_, you understand, but I'm not _beaten_! No, sir! I've only begun. I tell you, I've only begun. They can keep me off the delegation, what do _I_ care? I'll be at Springfield just the same. They can send that Singed Cat to Congress if they want to, what do I care? Jim Rankin--Jim Rankin--who's he? I'll lick 'em, I'll lick 'em _all_, every one, _yet_. You'll see, you wait and see. You hear me? You wait and see. I'll lick 'em all, every one, yet. I'll drive 'em out of the district. I'll drive 'em out of the state, from the Wabash on the east to the Mississippi on the west, from Dunleith to Cairo. I'll set the buffalo grass on fire and sweep the state clean of them. You will not find one of them o'er all the rolling prairies of Illinois."

As he rolled out the word "Illinois," in the tone the orators of that state use when they wish to show their state pride, he swung his arm in an all-embracing circle, and his auditors dodged the slopping whisky.

Then he stood and blinked at them.

"Why don't you fellows drink?" he broke forth again. "What do you want to stand around that way for? What are you afraid of? Jim Rankin? Think I'm licked, do you? Think I'm dead politically, do you? Well, I'll show 'em. I'll show 'em all. Why don't you drink, Pusey; why don't you drink up? Think I ain't got any money? Well, I'll show you--Chris here knows me. I'll show you--"

He fumbled in his pockets, produced a crumpled mass of green bills, and held them forth in his fist.

"I tell you there isn't room for them and me on all the broad expanse of Illinois--"

Some one struck up a favorite song of the campaign platforms:

"Not without thy wondrous story, Illinois, Illinois; Shall be writ the nation's glory, Illinois, Illinois; In the record of the years, Abr'ham Lincoln's name appears, Grant and Logan--and our tears, Illinois, Illinois."

The crowd huddled more closely together, and with heavy voices joined in the song. Some of the men, with serio-comical expressions, essayed the tenor, others the bass, though the bass predominated, and they sang over and over the few words of the song they could remember.

During this maudlin exhibition, the door opened, and Rankin, with Bailey by his side, entered. Rankin was bespattered from hat to heel, even his face was freckled with the little spots where the viscous mud had dried. His huge body was flaccid with fatigue, and his appearance was enough to show how heavily he had toiled at the polls that day in his determination to defeat Garwood. Bailey showed no sign of the equally hard day he had spent. He walked with the same awkward, shambling gait, his little eyes looked out from their narrowed lids and roved about him with their customary cunning. He showed neither signs of exhaustion, though he always looked tired, nor of the elation that probably was in his breast at the great victory which that day had been his.

Rankin, when he saw the crowd with Garwood as its center, halted suddenly and jerked his hat down over his eyes. He drew Bailey hurriedly to the bar near the mirrored partition that screened the scene within from the street without, and made a sign to Steisfloss. The saloon-keeper, with an alert appreciation of the situation which his long experience with men in their cups had taught him, silently moved that way, and bent a listening ear toward the newcomers.

"Give us a little drink--an' hurry. We'll get out--don't let him see," said Rankin.

Steisfloss's heavy German face showed none of the gratitude he felt, and quietly, almost surreptitiously, he set glasses and bottle before the successful candidate at that day's primaries and the man who had brought his success to pass.

Before they could take their liquor, some one at the edge of the crowd near Rankin noticed him. Rankin's quick eye detected the recognition, and he pulled the fellow toward him.

"Sh!" he whispered. "Don't let him see us. I didn't know he's here, or we'd not come in. We'll duck. How long's he been in here?"

"Oh," said the man, "ever since he got that last news from the First Ward."

Rankin could not restrain the gleam of pleasure that shot from his eye at the memory of that triumph, but the gleam softened as he stole a look at Garwood, and then, at last, died quite away, and there came in its stead an expression of pain and pity.

"Poor Jerry!" he said, "I thought he's a little off when he came--" he checked himself, and then--"when I saw him this afternoon," he continued.

He looked at him for another moment, and then he said, angrily, to the man whom all the time he kept between him and the crowd:

"Why don't some o' you fellers get him out o' here? What do you want to let him disgrace himself that-away fer?"

The man looked at Rankin and shrugged his shoulders to tell how helpless they all were.

"We've tried," he said. He looked around toward Garwood, who, having concluded another speech, was tipping his glass into his mouth, his head toppling on his neck as he did so. The man turned back again to Rankin, still with that helpless look, but, suddenly, with a flash of the eye as if a new thought had just come to him, he said:

"You try, Jim; you could do it. He thinks more of you to-day than of all the rest put together."

Rankin faced the bar and hastily swallowed his bourbon.

"No," he said; "that's past."

And then he and Bailey slipped away.

"Poor Jerry!" sighed Rankin, as they went out the door.

But the Singed Cat, whose personality was destined so soon to become the passion of the cartoonists, turned and cast back at his defeated rival one of those glances from his unsearchable little eyes.

XIII

At the close of a day late in November Emily Garwood came down the walk from the old house that had been her home so long, and at the gate paused for a backward glance of farewell. The oaks under which for so many years she had watched the coming and going of all she loved, were barren, save for the few bronzed leaves that clung with the tenacity of their species to the gnarled boughs. Other leaves, withered and yellow, that had succumbed to the common fate of things, strewed the ground everywhere. Here and there they had been pressed into wet mats by the cold autumnal rains; otherwise they rustled with the wind that ranged through the wide yard.

The night was falling swiftly, the darkness increasing by visible degrees as if with the gradual closing of some automatic shutter that was ultimately to exclude the light. Black shadows rose unexpectedly from the ground and silently enfolded objects Emily had known so long that they had become a part of her very life, so intimately associated with all its experiences that she realized her own affection for them but now, when she was leaving them. The old home, to her sensitive imagination, seemed to regard her out of its vacant, lifeless windows with a cold and distant stare, as if already it had begun to forget her.

And so she closed the gate softly, as if the clash of its latch might arouse memories that were making ready to pursue her out of the old homestead, drew more snugly into the hollow of her arm the bundle of odds and ends she had gathered up in her final inspection of its dismantled rooms, and hurried away along Sangamon Avenue. The atmosphere held in suspension many more autumnal rains, with such a chill besides that her little figure seemed to shrink with the cold, as it dissolved in the shadows and disappeared.

The day of the primaries had marked the fall of the last of Emily's ideals, and she felt, with her old habit of fixing a formal duty for every occasion that she must recognize the change by some definite, decisive act. But as she gradually revolved the problem life had set for her, and one after another weighed all the common solutions that men and women consider at such times--perhaps because of sheer inability to grapple with such monstrous spiritual difficulties--she shrank from them, finding them all so sordid, so squalid, so inadequate to a nature like hers. And so she lived on from day to day, trying to reason it out, and failing in that, awaiting the next scene in her domestic tragedy.

But nothing happened. Life went on somehow as before. If at times she reproached herself with what seemed her indecision, she strove with all conscience to perform the little duties of each day, until the great duty could be revealed clearly to her, yet self-consciously wondering how it was that she could think of common things, and do common things, just as she had wondered, at the time her father died, how it was, for instance, that she could leave the solemn twilight of the chamber where she had just witnessed the mystery of death, and straightway go and eat her supper. She did not see that her spirit was thus unconsciously struggling to reassert itself; to identify itself anew with the common, the real; to be like all else about it, for it had not yet been given her to appreciate the love for the normal, the abhorrence of the exceptional, the passion for equality that nature reveals in her dealings with her children.

She was convinced that she must have some kind of reckoning with Jerome; something in a way forensic and legal, with all the conventional elements of trial, judgment and retribution or forgiveness; at times she even dramatized the forms and terms of this proceeding, which would atone for the past, and leave them where they had been before. But the auspicious moment never presented itself; she realized at last that it could not come; that the old ground had been lost, and lost forever; that there could be nothing like resumption; that they must begin, if at all, anew.

And so the summer had passed. She watched Jerome narrowly, noting every change in humor, in whim, in expression, thinking it possible that he might broach the subject that lay so near the hearts of both. At first, in a remorse that was evident, he had been showing for her a new consideration; a furtive consideration that was likely to exaggerate its tenderness at times. He had sent her flowers and brought her candy, like a lover, and if these silent appeals--while they touched her--did not altogether reassure her, they must abundantly have reassured him, for in the course of weeks he seemed to have forgotten all save his own defeat. One afternoon he had come home, silent and preoccupied, and had moodily chosen to sit alone, staring out the window, though seemingly oblivious to the wonder and beauty of the October day, dying, like the year, in serene and majestic dignity. His immovable figure, there in the gloom, gradually oppressed her, got on her nerves, and at last drew her irresistibly into the room where he was. She sat down quietly, without disturbing him, in the hope that he would speak. She looked at him long, but he did not speak, he did not move. Finally this attitude became insupportable, and she at length broke the stillness.

"What is it, Jerome?" she asked.

"What?" he said.

"What is the matter?"

"Nothing is the matter," he answered in an aggrieved tone that altogether belied his words.

"But there is," she insisted, quite in the old way. "You are blue."

He was silent a moment longer, in an ugly reluctance to speak, and then,

"Well," he said, savagely, "debts, if you want to know."

She sighed. The old sordid struggle after all! He waited awhile longer, desiring her to coax him out of his mood, but she said nothing, and at last he was impelled to speak once more himself.

"I don't know what we are going to do," he said, "my creditors, now that I've been beaten, are making my office a rendezvous."

He spoke bitterly, as debtors do. He had leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his chin in his palms, and he looked more gloomily than ever out of the window. The light was just sufficient to mark the outlines of his really fine head, while the shadows of evening softened the lines in his face, the harsh, unpleasant lines that a few years had drawn there. She studied his profile, her eye caressing his curls, the curls she remembered so well--remembered, because she had a troubled sense of thinking now of Jerome as in the past. She gazed until the changes wrought by the short years of their common life passed away, and she saw again the Jerome of old--her own, her lost ideal.... If he had only gone down in some glorious conflict, through some mighty sacrifice, some great devotion to principle! Why had he failed? Had she not tried to do all that a wife could to help and guide him? If he had married some other woman, some woman of courser fiber, who would not have tried to keep him continually up to such high ideals? She paused, some sudden shock smote her, she felt her face grow cold and pale. Another woman married to Jerome Garwood! She caught her breath, her face burned as the blood rushed back to her cheeks again, and then suddenly, impulsively, she spoke, as much to herself, it seemed, as to her husband:

"I _do_ love you still, Jerome!"

Her heart beat with a new fierce joy. A revelation had come to her, a revelation that had solved her problem in an instant, a thing her reason had not been able to do in long months. She loved him still! There was the solution to her riddle of life! And this, this was the auspicious, the psychological moment, come at last! She waited in agony for him to speak, she leaned forward expectantly, and he half turned his head. Her eyes widened, almost flamed forth, as she felt, to meet his there in the darkness that had suddenly become all light for her. And then he laughed, a little laugh, that came harsh on the stillness, and he said:

"Why of course you do."

Her eyes fell. He took it then, quite in the old matter of course way! She turned her face aside, sick with disappointment.

But the revelation of that passionate moment had not been lost. It was to her, sure and certain. She could not doubt it. That Jerome had taken it all as he had could make no difference now to her. For the revelation had solved her problem, made her duty clear, and that was enough. The results of the solution had not been those of her heart's desire, but she could wait for that, for now she beheld the light of a new theory, a new ideal, that quickly glowed into an incandescence that illumined her whole soul. Loving Jerome still, she must live for him still, and this without any regard to what attitude he might take.

Her own happiness was of no importance; it must come, if at all, as a secondary and indirect result. The old ideal and the old ambition had been, after all, but selfish, and so had failed not only of realization, but of that nobler success that comes through failure in the high endeavors of life. She saw it all clearly now; when they had together dreamed of a career, it was not with the idea of being of real help to those about them, but merely of lifting themselves to some place that would distinguish them artificially from those about them. And in time, pondering on her relations to others in the world besides Jerome, she found that what was true of her relation to him was true of her relations to them; that her duty was to live for them as well as for him.

Here was at last a worthy plan of existence, an ideal, not of self, but service. It was simple when she put it to herself in this literal way, so very simple that it was almost trite, yet she had a conviction that it was none the less mightily true. She would not judge Jerome, but love him; she would not expose his faults, but cover them with a mantle of charity; a mantle so wide that it would cover as well all others groping through the world with their sins and their sufferings, their pitiable failures and their lamentable mistakes, and if, even by the slow and loving work of years, she could win Jerome in time to this new ideal that had arisen out of her darkness as the light of an autumn morning without clouds after long days of rain, then, indeed, could his talents worthily be devoted to the people he already thought he loved. Now she had found the faith in life so necessary to her existence. It was a new and better faith, and she could wait long and patiently, if need be, for its complete fulfilment.

Under the stimulus of this new-found faith in life, in an almost pathetic determination to be practical--since the sentimental seemed to be denied her--she decided first that their affairs be placed at once on a secure foundation. So with a touch of her father's own uncompromising rigor in business matters, she relentlessly cast up all their accounts, and if she winced when the amount of Jerome's debts stared her in the face, she nevertheless bravely set about paying them off, devoting to the purpose all her own income, now grown small with the periodical return of hard times. And then, last heroism of all, she resolved that they must give up their old home. Jerome demurred a little, but presently acquiesced.

He was interested anew in affairs, he had perhaps had revelations of his own, and if he did not have resolutions, he nevertheless had hopes. The campaign was on again, and, in a spirit of what he called party loyalty--as one who, winning or losing, honorably lives up to all the rules of the game--he was stumping the district, and making speeches for the ticket with as much of his old fire as if he had been on the ticket himself. Long before election his old self-satisfaction had returned, he was as full of splendid schemes as a bumblebee, and if his disinterestedness was not so apparent after election, when he felt that his chances of being appointed to a territorial judgeship were increasing more and more as the short session of Congress drew near, it may have been discovered in the fact that, as an alternative, he had revived his old project of going to Chicago to practise law. If he got the territorial judgeship, they would have to move West; in either event, he said, it did not matter much where they lived for the time being. He thought that if they went to Chicago he might go to Congress from some of the Chicago districts--it was not hard to get into politics there. But Emily only smiled.

She found through Morton, a tenant for the old home. She sent away the maids, even the nurse, for whom the children cried, and Jasper, who cried himself, until his very despair drove him to refuse to accept the discharge at all. And then she found a smaller house.

The last load of furniture had rumbled away in a covered van that afternoon; as the early twilight came she gave a final look into the empty corners of the old home, picking up little things that had been overlooked, and then, with an ache at the heart for its emptiness and loneliness, she bade it farewell. The moving had been an ordeal. She had had all the care of it, though Jerome's mother had helped, but beyond this was the spiritual agony of coming across old things she had not seen for years, things of her childhood, things of her girlhood; the dress she had worn when first she met Jerome--he had told her to preserve it, though he did not know where it was--things, too, of her mother's--a trying time for a soul already so heavily laden.

Now, hurrying along in the gloom of this November evening, she glanced at the big houses of the prosperous, and they repelled her with the flat austerity of their own provincial exclusiveness. As she advanced, these residences that had the effect of casting her off, gradually gave way to homes, rows of cottages, decreasing in size and importance; but as they grew smaller, Emily observed that they grew more companionable. Lights were beginning to show in their windows, the men were getting in from their work, and she could hear the homely sounds of evening chores.

By the time she reached the humbler street where she was henceforth to live, she felt a sympathy with these unambitious homes, finding a welcome, as it were, in the honest faces they presented in the dusk. She gave them back a brave little smile, reflecting her wish that she might find the peace they seemed to shelter. Pursued along those silent streets by the memories of the old home, she sought refuge in planning the furnishing of the new, mentally compressing the too abundant furniture into the smaller compass with which they must now content themselves.

And in her determination to begin anew, she simulated for the sake of her own courage the pride and joy of a bride's anticipation in setting up housekeeping. Were they not really beginning after all? Had not the years since their marriage been years of make-shift and make-believe? Were not those years even now falling away behind her, while brighter ones rose before? In the spring she would have a little garden; she could imagine John Ethan and his little sister playing among the flowers that would riot there, their little heads bobbing in the yellow sunlight. At the thought of the children she quickened her steps.

The house at last came into sight, standing in a small yard with a low picket fence about it. Some boy was passing by, showing his neighborliness by rattling a stick along the palings. John Ethan must have known her step, light and hurried as it was, for as she turned in at the gate the door of the house opened, and he stood there in the light that came from behind him. He was waiting for her. He called to her to hurry, and she ran up the walk, caught him in her arms, and hugged his little body to her breast. The baby bad gone to sleep, too tired to await her mother's coming. The grandmother was cooking supper amidst the disorder of the furniture and the boxes that had been crowded into the kitchen. As Emily held her boy to her breast, she felt the tears welling to her eyes, but she told herself that this was not the time for tears, for here began that new unselfish life in which she hoped at some far off distant day to find the peace and the happiness of which she had dreamed.

THE END

A LIST OF RECENT FICTION OF THE BOWEN-MERRILL COMPANY

THE GREAT NOVEL OF THE YEAR

THE MISSISSIPPI BUBBLE

_How the star of good fortune rose and set and rose again, by a woman's grace, for one John Law, of Lauriston_

A Novel by EMERSON HOUGH

Emerson Hough has written one of the best novels that has come out in America in many a day. It is an exciting story, with the literary touch on every page.--JEANNETTE L. GILDER, of _The Critic_.

In "The Mississippi Bubble" Emerson Hough has taken John Law and certain known events in his career, and about them he has woven a web of romance full of brilliant coloring and cunning work. It proves conclusively that Mr. Hough is a novelist of no extraordinary quality.--_The Brooklyn Eagle._

As a novel embodying a wonderful period in the growth of America "The Mississippi Bubble" is of intense interest. As a love story it is rarely and beautifully told. John Law, as drawn in this novel, is a great character, cool, debonair, audacious, he is an Admirable Crichton in his personality, and a Napoleon in his far-reaching wisdom.--_The Chicago American._

The Illustrations by Henry Hutt 12 mo. 452 pages, $1.50

The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_

_It is fresh and spontaneous, having nothing of that wooden quality which is becoming associated with the term "historical novel."_

HEARTS COURAGEOUS

By HALLIE ERMINIE RIVES

"Hearts Courageous" is made of new material, a picturesque yet delicate style, yet good plot and very dramatic situations. The best in the book are the defence of George Washington by the Marquis; the duel between the English officer and the Marquis; and Patrick Henry flinging the brand of war into the burgesses of Virginia.

Williamsburg, Virginia, the country round about, and the life led in that locality just before the Revolution, form an attractive setting for the action of the story.

With six illustrations by A. B. Wenzell 12mo. Price, $1.50

The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_

AN INTERESTING STORY OF FAMILY LIFE.

THE FIGHTING BISHOP

By HERBERT M. HOPKINS

"The Fighting Bishop" is drawn with firm, bold strokes and with a sufficiently scholarly atmosphere to make the picture life like. There is wisdom too, in the attitude of the author toward his characters; and the entire atmosphere of the book is of fine quality. The general accuracy and vividness of the portraiture are likely to impress everyone. * * * It contains passages and characterizations that some readers will find it difficult to forget.--_The Hartford Courant._

The Bishop's musical son, Stephen's, obstinate vanity, his irritable nervous nature, his impatience of advice and his wonderful confidence in his own genius are admirably brought out in the course of the narrative and the chapter containing his letters to his brother is one of the best in the book. It shows his character humorously and without exaggeration, and this is typical of the whole story. The author sees his personages with a human sympathic eye.--_New York Sun._

12 mo. Cloth, ornamental, $1.50

The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_.

"NOTHING BUT PRAISE"

LAZARRE

By MARY HARTWELL CATHERWOOD

Glorified by a beautiful love story.--_Chicago Tribune._

We feel quite justified in predicting a wide-spread and prolonged popularity for this latest comer into the ranks of historical fiction.--_The N. Y. Commercial Advertiser._

After all the material for the story had been collected a year was required for the writing of it. It is an historical romance of the better sort, with stirring situations, good bits of character drawing and a satisfactory knowledge of the tone and atmosphere of the period involved.--_N. Y. Herald._

Lazarre, is no less a person than the Dauphin, Louis XVII. of France, and a right royal hero he makes. A prince who, for the sake of his lady, scorns perils in two hemispheres, facing the wrath of kings in Europe and the bullets of savages in America; who at the last spurns a kingdom that he may wed her freely--here is one to redeem the sins of even those who "never learn and never forget."--_Philadelphia North American._

With six Illustrations by André Castaigne 12 mo. Price, $1.50.

The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_

A VIVACIOUS ROMANCE OF REVOLUTIONARY DAYS

ALICE _of_ OLD VINCENNES

By MAURICE THOMPSON

_The Atlanta Constitution says_:

"Mr. Thompson, whose delightful writings in prose and verse have made his reputation national, has achieved his master stroke of genius in this historical novel of revolutionary days in the West."

_The Denver Daily News says_:

"There are three great chapters of fiction: Scott's tournament on Ashby field, General Wallace's chariot race, and now Maurice Thompson's duel scene and the raising of Alice's flag over old Fort Vincennes."

_The Chicago Times-Herald says_:

"More original than 'Richard Carvel,' more cohesive than 'To Have and To Hold,' more vital than 'Janice Meredith,' such is Maurice Thompson's superb American romance, 'Alice of Old Vincennes.' It is, in addition, more artistic and spontaneous than any of its rivals."

VIRGINIA HARNED EDITION

12 mo., with six illustrations drawn by F. C. Yohn and a frontispiece in color by Howard Chandler Christy Price, $1.50

The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_

A STORY BY THE "MARCH KING"

THE FIFTH STRING

By JOHN PHILIP SOUSA

The "March King" has written much in a musical way, but "The Fifth String" is his first published story. In the choice of his subject, as the title indicates, Mr. Sousa has remained faithful to his art; and the great public, that has learned to love him for the marches he has made, will be as delighted with his pen as with his baton.

"The Fifth String" has a strong and clearly defined plot which shows in its treatment the author's artistically sensitive temperament and his tremendous dramatic power. It is a story of a marvelous violin, of a wonderful love and of a strange temptation.

A cover, especially designed, and six full-page illustrations by Howard Chandler Christy, serve to give the distinguishing decorative embellishments that this first book by Mr. Sousa so richly deserves.

With Pictures by Howard Chandler Christy 12 mo. Price, $1.25

The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_

"A NOVEL THAT'S WORTH WHILE"

_The_ REDEMPTION _of_ DAVID CORSON

By CHARLES FREDERIC GOSS

A Mid-century American Novel of Intense Power and Interest

_The Interior Says_:

"This is a book that is worth while. Though it tells of weakness and wickedness, of love and license, of revenge and remorse in an intensely interesting way, yet it is above all else a clean and pure story. No one can read it and honestly ask 'what's the use.'"

_Newell Dwight Hillis, Pastor of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, says_:

"'The Redemption of David Corson' strikes a strong, healthy buoyant note."

_Dr. F. W. Gunsaulus, President Armour Institute, says_:

"Mr. Goss writes with the truthfulness of light. He has told a story in which the fact of sin is illuminated with the utmost truthfulness and the fact of redemption is portrayed with extraordinary power. There are lines of greatness in the book which I shall never forget."

_President M. W. Stryker, Hamilton College, says_:

"It is a victory in writing for one whose head seems at last to have matched his big human heart. There is ten times as much of reality in it as there is in 'David Harum,' which does not value lightly that admirable charcoal sketch."

Price, $1.50

The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_

"THE MERRIEST NOVEL OF MANY, MANY MOONS."

MY LADY PEGGY GOES TO TOWN

By FRANCES AYMAR MATHEWS

The Daintiest and Most Delightful Book of the Season.

A heroine almost too charming to be true is Peggy, and it were a churlish reader who is not, at the end of the first chapter, prostrate before her red slippers.--_Washington Post._

To make a comparison would be to rank "My Lady Peggy" with "Monsieur Beaucaire" in points of attraction, and to applaud as heartily as that delicate romance, this picture of the days "When patches nestled o'er sweet lips at chocolate times."--_N. Y. Mail and Express._

12 mo. Beautifully illustrated and bound. Price, $1.25 net

The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_

"AS CRISP AND CLEAN CUT AS A NEW MINTAGE."

THE PUPPET CROWN

BY HAROLD MacGRATH

A princess rarely beautiful; a duchess magnificent and heartless; a villain revengeful and courageous; a hero youthful, humorous, fearless and truly American;--such are the principal characters of this delightful story.--_Syracuse Post-Standard._

Harold MacGrath has attained the highest point achievable in recent fiction. We have the climax of romance and adventure in "The Puppet Crown."--_The Philadelphia North American._

Superior to most of the great successes.--_St. Paul Pioneer Press._

"The Puppet Crown" is a profusion of cleverness.--_Baltimore American._

Challenges comparison with authors whose names have become immortal.--_Chicago American._

Latest entry in the list of winners.--_Cleveland World._

With illustrations by R. Martine Reay 12mo. Price, $1.50

The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_

"AN ADMIRABLE SOCIAL STUDY"

THE FALL OF THE CURTAIN

By HAROLD BEGBIE

The purpose of this brilliant story of modern English life is to show that a human being, well brought-up, carefully trained in the outward appearances of religion, with a keen intellectual perception of the difference between right and wrong, may still not have goodness, and that ambition may easily become the dominating force in such a character. So the book may be called a purpose novel, but in reading it, one no more thinks of applying so discredited an epithet to it than one would think of applying it to "Vanity Fair."

The author possesses an admirable style, clear, unaffected, strong. To the discriminating public, the book is certain to give far more pleasure than that public usually gets from a new novel.

With a Frontispiece by C. Allan Gilbert Cloth, 12 mo. Ornamental, $1.25 Net. Postage, 12 Cents

The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_

FULL _of_ INCIDENT, ACTION & COLOR

LIKE ANOTHER HELEN

By GEORGE HORTON

Mr. Horton's powerful romance stands in a new field and brings an almost unknown world in reality before the reader--the world of conflict between Greek and Turk.

The island of Crete seems real and genuine after reading this book; not a mere spot on the map. The tragic and pathetic troubles of this people are told with sympathetic force.

Mr. Horton employs a vivid style that keeps the interest alive and many passages are filled with delicate poetic feeling.

Things happen and the story moves. The characters are well conceived and are human and convincing. Beyond question Mr. Horton's fine story is destined to take high rank among the books of the day.

With illustrations by C. M. Relyea 12mo. Cloth bound Price, $1.50

_The Chicago Times-Herald says_:

"Here are chapters that are Stephen Crane plus sympathy; chapters of illuminated description fragrant with the atmosphere of art."

The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_

"A CHRONICLE OF MARVELS"

THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON

By H. G. WELLS

Author of "The War of the Worlds" and "Tales of Time and Space."

Mr. Wells writes to entertain and in this tale of the invention of "cavorite," and the subsequent remarkable journey made to the moon by its inventor, he has succeeded beyond measure in alternately astounding, convincing and delighting his readers. Told in a straightforward way, with an air of ingenuousness that disarms doubt, the story chronicles the most marvelous discoveries and adventures on the mysterious planet. Mr. Hering's many illustrations are admirable. Altogether the book is one of the most original and entertaining volumes that has appeared in many a day.

Profusely Illustrated by E. Hering 12mo. Cloth, $1.50

The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_

"AN INDIANA LOVE STORY"

ROSALYNDE'S LOVERS

By MAURICE THOMPSON

Author of "Alice of Old Vincennes"

As Mr. Thompson avers, this is "only a love story," but it is a story of such sweetness and wholesome life that it will at once claim a permanent home in our affections. The love of nature, so prominent a characteristic of Mr. Thompson, is reflected throughout and the thunderstorm and following gleam of sun, the country garden and southern lake are each in turn invested with a personality that wins our instant sympathy. Rosalynde Banderet is winsome and artless, her lovers are human and manly, and her final happiness is ours. Mr. Peirson's many pictures are entirely worthy.

With many Illustrations and Decorations by G. Alden Peirson Ornamental 12mo. Cloth Bound, $1.50

The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_

ANOTHER SUCCESSFUL HISTORICAL NOVEL

THE BLACK WOLF'S BREED

By HARRIS DICKSON

_From the Boston Globe_:

"A vigorous tale of France in the old and new world during the reign of Louis XIV."

_From the Philadelphia Press_:

"As delightfully seductive as certain mint-flavored beverages they make down South."

_From the Los Angeles Herald_:

"The sword-play is great, even finer than in the pictures in 'To Have and To Hold.'"

_From the San Francisco Chronicle_:

"As fine a piece of sustained adventure as has appeared in recent fiction."

_From the St. Louis Globe-Democrat_:

"There is action, vivid description and intensely dramatic situations."

_From the Indianapolis News_:

"So full of tender love-making, of gallant fighting that one regrets it's no longer."

Illustrated by C. M. Relyea. Price $1.50

The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_

"IN LONDON OF LONG AGO"

THE FICKLE WHEEL

By HENRY THEW STEPHENSON

In this tale of merry England, of the time when Shakespeare jested and Ben Jonson blustered, Mr. Stephenson has painted for us a picture informing and above all entertaining. His is not a story of counts and crowns, but of ever interesting common people. Without seeming to do so the author shows us many interesting bits of the life of the day. We go to Paul's walk, we see Shakespeare at the Globe theatre and other such glimpses of old time London are deftly added to our experiences. Throughout the book is an evanescent charm, a spirit of wholesome gaiety. It is well worth while.

With illustrations by C. M. Relyea Cloth, Ornamental, 12 mo. Price, $1.50

The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_

A FINE STORY OF THE COWBOY AT HIS BEST

WITH HOOPS _of_ STEEL

By FLORENCE FINCH KELLY

"The friends though hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel"

_From the San Francisco Chronicle_:

"Western men and women will read it because it paints faithfully the life which they know so well, and because it gives us three big, manly fellows, fine types of the cowboy at his best. Eastern readers will be attracted by its splendid realism."

_From Julian Hawthorne_:

"For my own part, I finished it in one day, and dreamt it over again that night. And I am an old hand, heaven knows."

_From the Denver Times_:

"Mrs. Kelly's characters stand out from the background of the New Mexican plains, desert and mountain with all the distinctness of a Remington sketch."

With 6 illustrations, in color, by Dan Smith Price, $1.50

The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_

VIGOROUS, ELEMENTAL, DRAMATIC

A HEART OF FLAME The story of a Master Passion

BY CHARLES FLEMING EMBREE Author of "A Dream of a Throne."

The men and women in this story are children of the soil. Their strength is their nearness to nature. Their minds are vigorous, their bodies powerful, their passions elemental, their courage sublime. They are loyal in friendship, persistent in enmity, determined in purpose.

The story is a story of great wrongs and of supreme love. It is done in black and white, with few strokes, but they are masterly. The shadows at the back are somber but the value of contrast is appreciated for the vivid high light in the foreground.

It is a work of art--powerful, convincing and abiding. Powerful, because true to life; convincing, because it has the saving touch of humor; abiding because love, like "A Heart of Flame," prevails in the end.

With illustrations by Dan Smith 12mo. Cloth. Price, $1.50.

The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_

"DIFFICULT TO FORGET"

A FEARSOME RIDDLE

By MAX EHRMAN

This mystery story, based on the theory of the arithmetical rhythm of time, contains much of the same fascination that attaches to the tales of Poe. Simply told, yet dramatic and powerful in its unique conception, it has a convincing ring that is most impressive. The reader can not evade a haunting conviction that this wonderful experiment must in reality have taken place. Delightful to read, difficult to forget, the book must evoke a wide discussion.

With Pictures by Virginia Keep 12 mo. Cloth, $1.00

The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_

A STORY TOLD BY A REAL STORYTELLER

A SON OF AUSTERITY

By GEORGE KNIGHT

Mr. Knight has created a real atmosphere for his men and women to breathe, and his men and women take deep breaths. They are alive, they are human, they are real.

He has a delightful story to tell and knows how to tell it. It is a story of human life, of possible people in possible situations, living out their little span of life in that state in which it has pleased God to call them.

The reader realizes at once that Mr. Knight is a man who served his seven years of apprenticeship before opening a shop on his own account.

The deftness and charm of his literary style, combined with the absorbing interest of the story, can not but prove a delight to every reader.

With a frontispiece by Harrison Fisher 12mo. Cloth. Price, $1.50

_The Liverpool Mercury says_:

"This is a book far removed from the ordinary mass of featureless fiction. There is no gainsaying the strength of characterization and the command of English language."

The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:

Minor changes have been made to regularize hyphenation and to correct typesetters' errors.

Words that were typeset in italics in the paper edition of this book have been noted with an underscore (_) preceding and following them.