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 by struggling to free himself, and by trying to prevent her from bathing him with her lotions.

In one access of delirium he sat up, glared at her with unrecognized fury, and shouted, "Get to hell out of this room, before I break in your skull!"

Whereupon she walked straight to the bed, pinned his shoulders to the pillow, and retorted, "Don't you say another word till I tell you to; if you order me out I may go, and if I do there'll be no one to give you a drink. Now lie still."

She held his eyes until she saw a return of lucidity. He collapsed, and said feebly, "Have I been bad? I can't have you overhearing me if I ramble."

She had overheard many illuminating scraps of confession. "Listen, Mr. Dare dear," she said, with tears in her eyes. "If you're going to get well soon, you must be perfectly quiet. The rambling doesn't matter, but try to fix it in your mind that you mustn't be rough. You're so terribly strong!"

"What's the use of getting well?" he moaned.

A few moments later his good intentions were consumed in the heat of new hallucinations. "Is that Claudia?" he shouted. "Oh God, it must be a thousand in the shade."

Sometimes he hummed a few bars of a lively melody, in appallingly unmusical tones. With a remorse that closed her ears to the grotesqueness of the performance Louise recognized the tune of their dance.

In a few days the ranch settled down to the new

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 order. Miriam and Keble made daily visits to the boat-slip, the doctor came as often as he could arrange the long trip, sometimes remaining overnight, and Mrs. Brown, her mind on the nights when Mrs. Eveley had sat and held Annie's hand, cooked tempting dishes and brought them to the window. She also took turns at sitting outside Dare's window while Louise lay down in the tiny sitting room of the cabin. Twice during the doctor's visits Louise had gone for a short gallop, but gave up the practise on learning that Dare had asked for her during her absence.

At the Castle Aunt Denise ruled with a sway that awed the servants but failed to produce the industry that Louise could inspire with a much laxer code. Keble and Miriam, after faint attempts to restore an unanalyzable comfort that had departed with Louise, fell into step behind Aunt Denise and were always relieved when the time came to go out of doors or repair to the library on business. During the first days Keble had been haunted by a fear that illness would break out in the house. Once in the middle of the night when he had been awakened by the sound of crying he ran to the nursery, half expecting to find the monkey speckled like a trout. Katie, with a trace of asperity, persuaded him that Baby was only suffering from wind, and this seemed plausible, for at the height of their wrangle the monkey relapsed into an angelic slumber, broken only by a motion of

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 lips that implied health of the serenest and greediest description.

Miriam found a deep, wistful contentment in trying to keep Keble's mind occupied. In the evenings Aunt Denise played patience and retired punctually at ten. Miriam usually remained another half hour at the piano, then Keble went alone to read in the library with his pipe and a decanter. He grew more taciturn than she had ever seen him, and this mood she dreaded, for it stirred the rebellious ego within her which had grown during the past months to unmanageable proportions.

En revanche Keble had moments when a new side of him came to light, an amiable, tender side which Miriam had long felt he took too great pains to suppress. After mornings and afternoons during which each had been employed in personal work or diversion, after evenings of music or cards or reading, there was an indescribable charm for her in the recurrence of Keble's boyish moods, when his man's mask was laid aside. It might be the recounting of some lark at school; it might be an experience in the trenches or in a corner of Greece or China during his bashful tour of the world; it might even be an admission of incurable dudishness in the face of some recent native provocation. Whatever it was, it was the essential Keble, the Keble whom Miriam might have met in a London drawing-room. His wife induced playful moods in him, but rarely did the playfulness Louise provoked keep within the bounds of

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 veiled, correct irony. For his wife's delectation Keble rendered his playfulness ever so slightly frisky, exaggerating the caricature of himself; whereas for her, Miriam liked to persuade herself, he projected a more ironically shaded sketch of himself which amused without being distorted.

"It's such a blessing to have you here, Miriam," he confessed one evening. "I should have gone quite dotty alone with Aunt Denise; Louise and Dare would have come back and found me with a rosary around my neck, gibbering the names of saints. I believe you were sent to us by some kind providence of God to be a universal stop-gap in our strange ménage. I wonder you bear up under the strain."

She was tempted to say, "I was sent to you not by God but by Walter Windrom," but she couldn't. Nor could she smile, for his timid candor gave her a pretext for reading into his remark some depth of feeling for which the tyrant within her clamored. But she succeeded in replying, "Oh I bear up wonderfully,—so well, in fact, that if everything were to run flawlessly I think I should be selfish enough to pray for another gap, that I might stop it!"

The tyrant had forced the words into her mouth, but her anxiety was dispelled by his manner of taking them. He passed his hand over his hair and said, whimsically, sadly, "Well, I don't see any immediate prospect of gaplessness . . . I suppose most ménages are the same, if you were to explore into them. They muddle along, sometimes on an even

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 keel, more often pitching about in cross currents. And I suppose one half of the ménage always feels that the other half is at fault, and there's no way of judging between them, because no two people are born with the same mental apparatus."

Disconcerted at the length he had gone, with a characteristic desire to efface the self-revelatory words, he came abruptly out of the mood by adding, "Is it apparatuses, or apparati? I see I've been talking nonsense again,—good-night."

Miriam wished that he had not seen fit to go back on his semi-confession, but she could not deny herself the comfort his soliloquy had given her, and for some days it served as a sop to her tyrant.

She had moments of futile compunction as she saw Louise growing haggard. Twice a day Miriam appeared at the boat-slip, but quite often Louise had seized those moments for a short nap, and there was nothing to do but leave the packets and messages on the jetty and return, or go for a walk with Grendel. She found in herself a dearth of inspiration when it was a question of making the day less tedious for her friend. Louise with her resourcefulness would have thought out endless ways of diverting her, had she been Dare's nurse. Miriam had pleaded to be allowed to assist. It was not only that she wished to spare Louise; she envied her the opportunity as well as the skill that called into play such magnificent services. Her own life seemed barren in contrast. Although ten years her junior, Louise had

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 been at the very heart of life, had loved, been loved, suffered, given birth, and grown strong through exercise. Miriam envied her the gruelling experience she was going through. She blushed to think how incompetent she herself would be in Louise's place, and how prudish; but incompetence and prudishness could be outgrown, and she longed to outgrow them.

She resented the fact that Keble seemed not to notice the degree of strain on Louise, the dark rings under her eyes, the drawn mouth. Louise was partly responsible for his failure to see, for whenever he called at the slip she forced herself to be bright and facetious. But any woman would have seen through Louise's brightness, and Keble as a man far less obtuse than most, ought to have seen through it, ought not to have wrung their hearts by his casual manner of calling out, in a recent leave taking, "Don't overdo it, Weedgie; we mustn't have you breaking down."

A night finally came when the little doctor announced that the crisis was passed, that the patient would recover. Only then did he admit that he had almost despaired. Had it not been for Louise's vigilance, Dare would not have survived a week, for he

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 was one of those giants who often succumb under the first onslaught of a complication of ailments.

"Louise has been splendid," Keble acknowledged. "It's lucky for Dare that they were such good chums."

The doctor turned on him with a suddenness that surprised Miriam no less than Keble. "You don't understand Louise," he said. "She would take as much pains to cure a wounded dog as she would to cure the Governor-General. She would do as much for the stable boy as she would do for you; under certain circumstances, more. For she gives her strength to the helpless. Dare was helpless, body and soul. If you had watched him tossing and heard him moaning your eyes would have opened to many things. He was not only physically lost, he was lost in spirit. An ordinary nurse would have tended his body. Louise has tended his spirit. By a thousand suggestions she has restored his faith in himself, created him. For you that spells nothing but the service of a clever woman for a friend. What do you know about service? What do you know about friendship? What do you know about the sick man? What do you know about life? What do you know about Louise? Precious little, my boy!"

The doctor disappeared in a state of exaltation, leaving Keble bewildered. "There's a blind spot in me somewhere, Miriam," he said. "Can you put your finger on it?"

"I'm afraid we're both blind," she said feebly.

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 "At least we haven't their elemental clairvoyance. The doctor is doubtless right in his flamboyant way, and we are right in our pitiful way. We can only try, I suppose, to be right at a higher pitch."

"By Jove," Keble suddenly exclaimed, with a retrospective fear, "it was a closer shave than we had any idea of. I wonder if Louise realized."

Miriam smiled bitterly. "You may be quite sure, my dear Keble, that she did. If you have been spared a great load of pain, you may take my word for it that it's Louise you have to thank."

Keble was pale. In his eyes was the look which Miriam had seen on another occasion, just before the birth of his son. "Then I do wish," he quietly said, "that my friends would do me the kindness to point out some of my most inexcusable limitations, instead of letting me walk through life in a fool's paradise."

Miriam was ready to retort that even such a wish reflected the amour propre that determined most of his acts, but she had been touched by the emotion in his eyes and voice,—an emotion which only one woman could inspire. "I think we're all trying desperately to learn the ABC's of life," she said.

She was unnerved by the self-abasement that had stolen into his expression. For the first time in her life she went close to him and took his hand in hers. "Don't mind if I've spoken like a preacher," she pleaded in a voice which she could control just long

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 enough to finish her counsel. "The sermon is directed at my own heart even more than yours."

He returned the pressure of her hands absent-mindedly, and she sought refuge in her room.

Keble was restless and turned towards the library through force of habit. A book was lying face down on the arm of his chair, but after reading several sentences without hearing what they were saying, he got up and poured himself a glass of whisky.

He would have gone to the piano, but Miriam's superior musicianship had given him a distaste for his own performances. He wandered through the drawing-room to the dimly-lit hall, and found himself before the gramaphone. Every one had gone to bed, but if he closed the shutters of the box the sound would not be loud enough to disturb the household. At haphazard he chose a record from a new supply.

A song of Purcell's. He threw himself into a deep chair. The opening bars of the accompaniment were gentle and tranquilizing, with naïve cadenza. A naïve seventeenth century melody, which was taken up by a pretty voice: high, clear, pure.

Those words! He leaned forward, and listened more intently.

"I attempt from love's sickness to fly—in vain—for I am myself my own fever—for I am myself my own fever and pain."

As though a ghost had stolen into the dark room, Keble started slowly from his chair. His eyes riveted on the machine, he paused, then abruptly

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 reached forward to stop it, inadvertently causing the needle to slide across the disk with a sound that might have been the shriek of a dying man.

For a long while he stood holding the disk. Only when he became conscious of the startled beating of his heart did he throw off the spell.

He was staring at the record in his hands—the ghost. He dreaded the noise that would be made if he were to drop it on the floor,—even if he were to lay it down carefully and snap it with his heel.

He got up swiftly, unbolted the door, and walked out in the cold air to the end of the terrace, past the stone parapet, down the grassy slope to a point overhanging the shore of the lake. Far, far away, through the blackness, were tiny points of light, marking the location of the Browns' cottage. His eyes sought a gleam farther along the shore, but there was nothing in all that blackness to indicate Miriam's old cabin.

They were there, perhaps asleep, perhaps wearily wakeful, with only their souls left to fight for them against some vague, sinister enemy. Perhaps she was watching over him as he slept; preparing his draughts; stirring the fire with a little shiver. Perhaps she, too, had been approached by spectres. Perhaps she was ill, despairing, afraid. Tears came into his eyes.

He could feel the disk pressing against his fingers, and the tiny hard rills through which the needle had traced its uncanny message.

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 "What do you know of the sick man!" Above the mysterious silence of the night a phantom voice, thin, clear, dainty, was singing the answer into his understanding: "I attempt from love's sickness to fly, in vain; for I am myself my own fever and pain." It could so airily sing, as though it were a toy song and a toy sentiment, words which were as irrelevantly indicative as flowers nodding over a grave.

Many years ago he and Walter had played a game called "scaling". You chose round, flat pieces of slate and sent them whirling through the air.

He scaled, and waited for the splashing sound far out on the water.

Poor little record, it had meant well enough.

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EBLE had received a petition signed by Conservatives throughout the county inviting him to present himself as candidate for the provincial elections. He had foreseen this, but hesitated to accept the nomination. In the first place he was barely thirty; in the second place success at the polls would mean protracted absences from the ranch; in the third place he was not sure that Louise would approve. He remembered her saying, apropos of her Uncle Alfred Mornay-Mareuil, "If he had only been able to control his ambition! Politics is as demoralizing as gambling." And Keble quite often took Louise's remarks at their literal value.

When it came time to select a candidate for the elections, the scattered Conservatives of the district, knowing that the only hope of making a showing against their entrenched opponents was to induce Keble Eveley, with his important holdings and the prestige of his name, to stand for them, had encountered opposition from the supporters of the mayor of Witney, who in several consecutive elections had suffered defeat at the hands of the Liberal candidate, but who had learned to look forward to his periodical worsting as an agreeable break in the monotony

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 of his days. The repeated success of the Liberal representative had resulted in over-confidence on the part of that gentleman. He had been weaned from his county, had invested his savings in the capital, and returned home only to collect rents or sell at a substantial profit stock which he had acquired at bargain prices. A feeling was abroad, among Liberals and Progressives, as well as Conservatives, that the electors were being "used for a good thing."

The Conservative leaders knew Keble through business dealings or hearsay. Some of them had joined in a deputation to receive Lord Eveley and Mr. Windrom at Witney. They all saw the wisdom of putting up a vigorous, intelligent, and earnest young man, and the supporters of the veteran Conservative candidate, in the hope of a change of luck, ended by yielding to the suggestion. The official invitation was brought to Hillside by Pat Goard, the campaign manager, and his henchman, the editor of the "Witney Weekly News".

It was on a mild October afternoon. Keble received the delegates in the library, heard their arguments, and asked for an hour to consider. Aunt Denise had bowed with frigid graciousness and withdrawn. Keble asked Miriam to show the visitors over the grounds, then ran down the path to the jetty, jumped into the launch, and motored across the lake, which to-day was an expanse of bright blue rippled by the most gentle of breezes. The slender white trees on the lower shore with their scanty rem-

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 nants of pale yellow foliage, the bare branches of other hardwoods, and the deep rust of the underbrush were the only tangible proofs of the season. Everything else was gold and sapphire.

As he neared the boat-slip Keble saw that Louise had set up a deck chair in a sunny patch before the cabin, and had installed Dare in it. It was his first glimpse of Dare in several weeks and he was shocked at the wasted face that appeared above the rugs. For the first time he had some inkling of what the other man had been through, and a wave of compassion and affection surged through him.

Louise was sitting at Dare's side, and they were talking quietly, intimately. Although there was almost a life and death contrast between the two, Keble was no longer blind to the fact that his wife had worn herself to a dangerous margin, and while he could approve of her act, in the sense in which Aunt Denise approved of it, he could not, like Aunt Denise, look on unmoved. Something in the languor of the scene, something in the intimacy which seemed to unite the two, aroused a throbbing ache within him. Like Miriam he had felt futile in the face of this struggle, and now he almost envied Dare the suffering that had opened to him a secret garden. He paid blind tribute to whatever force in Dare,—a force transcending mere personality,—awakened in Louise a spirit that he had never been able to evoke. "I blunder and obtain forgiveness," he reflected, "while Dare is right, and pays terrific penalties."

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 Louise came to the end of the jetty to meet him, and they talked about Dare's first day outside the improvised hospital.

"Only for an hour," she said. "Then he has to go back. But it marks the beginning of a new era."

Keble would not let himself speculate on the nature of the new era. "And you can soon rest," he said. "Be very careful now. This is the most dangerous time of all for you."

She waved away the fear. "Who are those men on the terrace?"

Keble explained their mission. "I'd like you to decide for me."

She remembered an occasion when Keble had wished her to decide upon decorations for the Castle, and she had hurt him by her indifference.

As she sat thinking, her arms resting limply in her lap, Keble noted with a pang the absence of her old elasticity. She looked older, and tired. He had an impulse to get out of the boat and take her in his arms. He reflected that a man like Dare, in his place, would have scouted her precautions. But there was the baby to think of, and,—cautious men were cautious.

"I'm hesitating," Louise finally said, "only because I'm timid about deciding for you. But I don't mind saying that if you accepted and were successful the monkey and his grandfathers and I would be highly gratified."

Tears came to Keble's eyes,—an indiscretion

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 which he lost no time in correcting. "Right-oh! . . . Tell Dare how glad we are to know he's on the mend, and find out if there's anything he'd especially like. The people in Vancouver wrote that his ticket to Japan will be valid for a reservation on any later boat . . . Good-bye dear. Miriam and I will call again after dinner."

"Bring a volume of Swinburne if you think of it. We've been trying to recall some lines."

He promised, and she laughed to see him make a methodical note of it.

"Good luck!" she called out, as he started the engine.

"Thanks, old girl. Awfully decent of you to think I may have a chance."

"It's in your blood!"

"It's a dyed-in-the-wool Liberal constituency," he deprecated. "And what isn't Liberal leans towards the Progressive."

"I'd despise a victory I hadn't had to fight for!"

"I believe you would," he laughed, as though her militancy were one of her amusing caprices.

Miriam's unwieldy charges were drinking whisky and soda on the terrace, in preference to tea in the drawing-room.

"How's the patient?" she inquired.

"Able to sit up and take a little Swinburne," Keble reported with a truculence that wasn't meant to be as unkind as it sounded.

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 "Consulted the missus, have you?" inquired a business-like campaign manager.

"I have. The answer is in the affirmative."

Keble received a thump on the back that made him vividly conscious of the sort of thing he had now let himself in for. Could he thump, he wondered. The first attempt was not too great a success, but one would undoubtedly improve with practise.

"Now let's get down to tacks," said Mr. Goard, when further drinks had been consumed in honor of the event.

The delegates required a message to take back to party headquarters, and Keble dictated an outline of his political credo, the logic of which was warmed and colored in conformity with the ejaculated amendments of Pat Goard.

"Will that do the trick?" Keble finally asked.

"That'll do for a start," Mr. Goard replied, and Miriam went to transcribe her notes at the typewriter.

"Our best to the missus," said the manager half an hour later as he got into the car that had brought him to Hillside. "You couldn't have a better platform than her." Mr. Goard went on to express the opinion that it would be the "best fight ever put up", but added that "those birds took a lot of beating".

Keble promised to fight his hardest, and had a final word for the newspaper man. "Be sure to emphasize that it's a straight program of common

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 sense,—without flummery or mud-slinging or rosy promises that can't be fulfilled."

The editor acquiesced, but privately reserved the prerogative of serving up Keble's phrases at a temperature and with garnishings adapted to the Witney palate. He had seen elections won by lungs and knuckles.

"Well," Keble laughed on returning to Miriam's side. "That's done it! Do you remember the play, 'What Every Woman Knows'? You'll have to be Maggie Wylie and edit my speeches."

Miriam's tyrant exulted, but her honesty compelled her to say, "I doubt whether your supporters will appreciate my genius; it runs to neatness of copy and pluperfective subjunctives. Maggie Wylie put damns into her husband's speeches, and Louise is the only person who can find the Witney and Valley equivalents. Is there any occasion she can't rise to, for that matter?" This last remark was a trifle bitter.

In Keble's mind was an image of Louise sitting beside her patient, quoting Swinburne. "We'll submit our efforts to her," he agreed. "We'll pack Louise into an imaginary hall on the boat-slip, and I'll stand up on an imaginary platform and rant. Louise will be the proletariat and boo, clap, or heckle. Then we shall know where we stand."

"We are babes in the wood, you and I," Miriam observed, with a familiar sense of incompetence.

For days they collected statistics, held consulta-

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 tions with visiting politicians and office-seekers, wrote and answered letters, made rough drafts of speeches which were in turn delivered before the "vast audience of one" on the boat-slip. More than once Keble and Miriam, seated in the launch, glanced at each other in dismay as Louise tore their sentences limb from limb.

"It's beautiful comme argument," she once commented, "only it lacks drama. Remember, darling, you have to sway them, not convince them. Once you get inside the Assembly you may be as cool as a cucumber and as logical as Euclid, but if you wish the natives to get you there, you have to tickle and sting them! That argument about neglected roads needs to be played up stronger. Picture the perils of taking your best girl for a Sunday drive from Witney to the Valley, with the horse getting mired and the off wheel starting an avalanche down the side of the Witney canyon and your best girl rolling down the hill to kingdom come; then suddenly turn serious and describe what decent roads would do for everybody, including yourself. Don't be afraid to make the farmers see that you yourself have something to gain. Show them how the reforms you advocate would stimulate your trade as well as theirs and increase the value of your property."

After this comment a detailed overhauling of the address in question was commenced, with Keble dictating and Louise, insinuating metaphors in the local

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 vernacular. Dare from his deck chair in the distance watched or dozed until the boat had departed.

"How is the campaign progressing?" he asked after one prolonged consultation.

"Splendidly. Keble and Miriam are up to their neck in statistics. They go to Witney to-morrow for a preliminary duster . . . Papa says we'll be out of quarantine before election day."

Dare watched her silently for some time. "Why do you always bracket their names? You seem to do it deliberately, as though it were a difficult phrase which you were bent on mastering."

"It may be."

"You can confess to me, you know. We've proved at least that."

She patted his hand.

"May I guess out loud?" he asked.

She nodded.

He paused to choose his words. "You feel that Keble and Miriam have grown to depend on each other in some way analogous to the way in which you and I depended on each other."

She did not deny it.

"With us, our relation flared up one day into a white flame which for you seemed merely to cast a light over your past and future, but which for me burnt into me till I—began to rave."

Again she stroked his hand. Lines of fatigue showed in her face, and her eyes were fixed on the ground.

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 "For the sake of the good we had brought each other, you felt that when I,—the weaker of the two as it turned out,—collapsed, you owed it to me and to yourself to patch my life together again. You felt that we had gone into an expedition together, an intellectual expedition, and that one of us had succumbed to an emotional peril. Like a good comrade you stood by. When you had wrestled with the Angel of Death you made sure that the Angel of Life should have a fair field. When I was strong enough to realize what had made life too great a burden, you began tenderly, wisely, patiently to make me see that, even without the fulfilment of the greatest boon I had ever craved, life still held possibilities. You dug up all my old sayings, pieced together my damaged philosophy which had seemed sufficient in the days before the white flame burned my cocksure ideas to a crisp, and you made a more beautiful garment of it than I had ever succeeded in fashioning. You showed me how I could keep the fragrance of the flower without crushing the flower itself. You read me passages, God save the mark, from La Nouvelle Héloise which a few years ago I would have dismissed with a snort, but in which you made me believe. You read me one of your early poems which bore to your present wisdom the relation of a chrysalis to a winged faith and you ended by persuading me that my collapse merely marked the transition of my old chrysalis of a philosophy into something winged and courageous like yours,—a

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 transition that cannot be accomplished without pain. . . . The patience, the love even, that you expended on me ended by making me see, as you intended it should, that this crisis, my overthrowing of my angel of selfishness, was a greater blessing than any blessing which could have grown out of a surrender on our part to the urge we both felt,—for you did feel it, too, I think. . . You led me back to my own path by quoting the lines:

Your faith in me,—a generous faith that wasn't afraid of caresses,—was a faith in life, in human decency. And now you are extending it, on some generous impulse, to another quarter. I think I'm guessing right?"

Louise showed no wish to interrupt him, and he ventured on. "In the companionship of Keble and Miriam you see something which suggests an analogy with our relation. We had adventurousness to offer each other; they have inhibitions to share. You feel that interference on your part would deprive them of a right you have claimed yourself: their right to work out some problem of their own; just as interference in our case would have denied us a privilege of deep understanding and sacrifice."

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 He paused for a moment. "That's my guess. Now may I offer a suggestion, for what it's worth?"

"Go on."

"You have one terrible weakness. In mending another's life you are infallible. You are less sure when it comes to taking care of your own. The thought that you might be prompted by selfish motives would be enough to make you refrain from interference. But have you the right to stand by and see two lives drifting on a course that might entail your own destruction? If you had been able to put yourself irrevocably into my keeping, that would have been one thing. But you weren't quite. At the same time you came far enough in my direction to jeopardize your old security. If you were to become lost, now, on no man's land, I should never forgive myself for letting myself be persuaded by you . . . I've put an extreme case because I know you're not afraid of facing any conceivable contingencies."

"There's more in it than that," she finally replied, and her voice announced a maturity born of suffering. "Because it's a relationship for which I am responsible. If I were to get lost on no man's land, which isn't at all likely, it would be a direct result of my objection to trenches, and no one but myself could be made to pay the penalty of my recklessness. I brought Miriam here for my own reasons, and kept her here. Keble and I were traveling independently; for I couldn't resist dashing off his pathway whenever the mood seized me. The more liberties

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 I took, the more obvious it became that Miriam and Keble had a similar gait. They were always there, together. I was glad for Keble's sake, and certainly, since I felt free to scamper about in any direction I chose, I couldn't deny him the right to the companionship of any one who could keep in step with him. People have to have companions.

"I have even been glad for Miriam's sake. Miriam gave me more than I asked of her. At times I must have got on her nerves. What had she by way of compensation? By way of penalty she had a gradual alienation from her old life. I could no more think of destroying her new sources of interest than I could think of destroying the new sources of interest to which she brought me the clue. The fact that Keble may have become the central figure of Miriam's new interests is an accident over which I have no control, just as the fact that you became a vital force in my new enthusiasms was an accident over which Keble had no control, over which no one but myself had any control, and not even until I had learned its full significance. Life is an uncharted ocean full of such reefs; only fools try to sail through them; wise people sail around them. If I've learned anything in the last two years I've learned that freedom, like everything worth having, costs heavily; every great happiness is bought at the price of a great unhappiness. That's only fair. And I won't be niggardly. . . When Keble and Miriam learn the full significance of their problem, as I have

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 already done, they will find their own solution. Human liberty means that, if it means anything. ..

"You and I fought out our issue and came to our conclusion, which happened to be that our ways lie apart. You have the song of your secret bird. I have something equivalent,—though it doesn't exactly sing! If one has played the game according to one's own rules, and not cheated,—not enough to count,—then that in itself puts a sort of backbone into one's life . . . At times a lot of horrid little devils come tripping up through me, tempting me to be cheap and jealous, to interfere, to kick and scratch,—oh Mr. Dare dear, why do you let me say all these rubbishy things? I talk like a book of sermons to convince myself, but the real me is terribly wordless and weak and silly and bad and preposterous"

She broke down, and Dare drew her head to his side, stroking her hair and patting courage into her shoulders.

Once Dare was safely on the high road towards recovery his progress was rapid. Before long he was able to walk into the maze of trails which led away from the end of the lake, and the day at length came when Dr. Bruneau lifted the ban.

Clad in fresh garments, Louise and Dare made a bonfire of the clothing and bedding and books from the cabin. "There go all the outlived parts of us,"

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 Dare commented as the flames leaped up into the frosty blue-grey morning air. "We'll be phoenixes. . . . I shall never be able to express my gratitude to you; a man has nothing to say to the person who has saved his life, any more than he has to say to the forces that originally gave life to him. He can only accept, marvel, venerate, and use!"

When the fire was low enough to be abandoned with safety, they turned towards the lake, sharing a sense of freedom and poignant exultation that could only find expression in a deep sigh. "There's no sign of the boat," Louise said. "Let's walk. We can take it slowly, and it's a glorious morning for walking."

It was; but Louise couldn't deny that it would have been pleasant to have been sought out, this particular morning, to have been called for and escorted back to the Castle. She would have warmed to some manifestation of extra thoughtfulness on the morning when all Hillside knew that she and Dare were to be released from their imprisonment. Besides, she was tired.

When, hand in hand, they reached the familiar short-cut across the meadow and saw the house standing out in cold sunlight from the base of Hardscrapple, Louise felt more keenly than ever before what a beautiful home she had possessed. The broad terraces and frost-nipped hedges, the withered flower stocks, the pretty hangings behind polished plate-glass, the bedroom balcony with its tubs of

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 privet, the smoke ascending from the chimneys, the perambulator standing outside the door of the sun-parlor, the road bending away towards the dairy and barns,—it all held associations for her sweeter than she would have admitted, and her sense of joy in possession was flavored with a sense of the precariousness of possession. She recalled one of her introspective phrases, that "it was inherent in the nature of charm that it couldn't be captured or possessed,—except in symbols or by proxy". How terrible it would be to find oneself in possession of symbols from which the charm had departed!

A woman in black appeared at the door and came out on the terrace. Louise turned suddenly to Dare with a whimsical smile. "If you have only one funny, cross old lady in the world to represent your stock of sisters and cousins and aunts, and who really ought to have been a Mother Superior, you're obliged to love her, aren't you?"

Dare judged that you were.

"And if you love Aunt Denise, it's perfectly obvious you can't dote on people like Mrs. Windrom and Ernest Tulk-Leamington and lots of others. Don't you agree?"

"I'll agree fast enough, but I can only take your word that it's obvious."

"She really is pure gold under all that black,—but she's so far under."

Aunt Denise waited with outstretched hands. "You are both very welcome!" she cried, and turned

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 to congratulate Dare. "Toi, mon enfant," she continued, with her arm about Louise's shoulders, and using the familiar pronoun for the first time since her arrival, "Tu as bien fait. Tu es vraiment la fille de ton père, et de ta pauvre mère. Du Ciel elle t'a envoyé du courage."

Louise went indoors and her eyes feasted on the colorful tapestries, the shiny spaces, the blazing logs, the flowers, the vases and rugs and odors, the blue and gold vistas through high window-doors. As she entered the library Keble and Miriam looked up from a broad table littered with papers.

Keble came running to greet her. "Why, my dear, we weren't looking for you so early! We planned to take the launch and fetch you."

"Couldn't wait." She went to kiss Miriam. "It's quite all right, dear. There's not a germ left. We've exterminated the species. How is the campaign?"

"We're in the throes of final preparations," said Keble. "To-night is the big meeting in the Valley. The telephone has already been humming. Yesterday our enemies cut the wires; that shows that they dread us."

"I'll run off and let you work," said Louise, "till lunch."

"It's to be a gala lunch," Miriam warned. "Don't give a single order. They're all jubilant at your return,—so are we, dear."

"Have they been starving you?"

"Do we look starved?"

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 Louise surveyed them. "No, you look jolly fit. I believe you have got along quite comfortably without me; I rather hate you for it."

Keble kissed her. "Go see the monkey," he suggested. "We'll be out as soon as we get through this. Explain to Dare."

As Louise closed the library door she combated a desire to cry, then went out not to see the monkey, but a friendly band of slaves that happened to include Katie Salter, ergo the monkey.

Lunch proved festive. Keble was excited; Miriam played big sister; and Aunt Denise reigned with clemency. Dare was still far below par, and his smile was wan; but he was sufficiently his old self to enter the spirit of the occasion.

Talk turned to politics. "You'll come to-night, of course?" Keble invited Louise. "Your father has offered to put us up. We leave for Witney to-morrow morning. If you're too tired to go on you can stay at your father's till the tumult and the shouting die."

"What about my patient?"

Dare answered for the patient's welfare. "In the absence of his hosts, he will install himself at their table, take second helpings of everything, then pray for the speedy advent of the next meal, oblivious to the political destinies of the Dominion."

"Glad to see your appetite back," said Keble. "Does a man good to see you so greedy."

After a stroll with Keble, Dare came back to the

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 sun-parlor, where he found Louise checking items in a mail order. He took up a magazine and lay in the hammock.

"I'm ordering some winter provisions," she informed him.

"You haven't let much grass grow under your feet."

"The grass has become knee-deep since I've been away."

Miriam came to the doorway, but hesitated a moment on hearing this last remark, which alluded to goodness knew what. "We're to be ready at four," she said. "Keble wonders if you could put tea ahead a half hour."

Louise got up, giving Dare's hammock a little shake. "Tea at four instead of four thirty, do you hear, Mr. Dare dear? Are you thrilled?"

"Couldn't make it three thirty, could you?"

Louise had caught Miriam's arm and was towing her into the hall. "Don't look so glum," she commanded. "Let's find Gertie and tell her tea at four, then pack our bags."

"What will you wear?" Miriam asked, surveying Louise's khaki and wondering what Louise had meant by "glum".

"What I have on," replied Louise.

"What! Riding breeches on the platform?"

"Pooh, everybody in the Valley knows my legs by heart! Besides, an election eve mass meeting isn't like a speech from the Throne."

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 Miriam was wondering whether she should ask for an explanation of "glum", but remained silent as Louise "told Gertie tea at four", then led the way upstairs. In Louise's room, however, the chatter irritated her, and again Louise intrigued her by saying, "For heaven's sake, Miriam, what's up?"

"Nothing that I know of."

"Something is."

"Well if it's anything," Miriam temporized, "it's so little that it's practically nothing. Besides it's none of my business."

"All the more, then."

"The more what?"

"Necessary to spit it out, darling. Excuse my vulgarity. It's only my real nature coming out in the joy of getting away from that shack. If not your business, probably mine. Fire away."

"You'll think me Mrs. Grundyish."

"Anything to do with the patient?"

"Thanks for helping me. With Mr. Dare dear, so to speak."

"Oh!"

"It's only that,—well, now you've brought him through, shall you need to be as attentive to him?"

"Conspicuously attentive?"

"It amounts to that."

"People been saying catty things?"

"People always do."

"You and I don't let 'people' dictate our actions."

Miriam stopped to ask herself how much terri-

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 tory Louise's "you and I" might be meant to cover. "No," she assented, "yet there's something to be said for not giving people unnecessary topics for gossip, especially now that the Eveleys are on exhibition. It would be a pity if your generosity were to be misinterpreted."

Louise snapped the cover of her bag and sat on a chair facing Miriam. Her face had become serious. "Miriam, dear, are you sure you know why you are so agitated about my attentions to Dare?"

Miriam bit her lip. Had Louise guessed that her appeal was in the nature of a final effort to make Louise intervene between herself and the tyrant which had been inciting her to snatch at any fact or appearance favoring the disloyal cause? "Whatever the cause of my agitation, as you call it, I hope you won't dismiss my caution as mere meddlesomeness."

Louise got up and came to place her hands over Miriam's knees, with an impulsive yet earnest directness. "Our lives are fearfully unstable, dear. We're constantly raising little edifices in ourselves which we think are solid; then along comes some trickle of feeling and washes the edifice away, leaving only a heap of sand. The problem is to find materials within us more reliable than sand, impervious to chance streams of feeling, with which we can reinforce our edifices, so that they will see us through a lifetime . . . Only after a series of washouts do we recognize the necessity of using a durable mortar.mortar, [sic]

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 and it takes still longer to discover what materials in us are durable and how to mix them. We've only experience to go by. I don't think I'm over-conceited in saying that I've learned my lesson; and I don't think I'm claiming too much for Dare when I say that he has learned his. In any case we're answerable only to ourselves, and I don't see why any one need worry."

Miriam's agitation was now undisguised, though its cause was not called into question. Only her impatience restrained her from weeping. "I don't understand you," she finally said. "You have outlandish moods which make you do outlandish things, then you offer outlandish explanations in the form of universal laws . . . How are ordinary mortals to be helped by your offhand statement that the solution of personal complications is to find some durable material to cement everything together? That's begging the question. If you have the durable materials within you, they should protect you from washouts; on the other hand, if you suddenly find yourself in a mess and discover simultaneously that you're nothing but sand and water, what are you going to do? You can't borrow concrete from your neighbors."

"Yes you can. That's what churches and philosophy and art and schools are for. The other name for concrete is Wisdom. There's heaps of it in the world; one has only to help oneself."

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 "Again you're begging the question. That wisdom abounds doesn't imply that everybody is wise enough to prefer it to folly."

Louise got up and walked back to her dressing table. "But there, as Dare once reminded me, is where nature steps in. If people are hopelessly weak-willed, they have to be cared for and put up with; it's not their fault. But nature's average is quite high on the side of strength. Human beings are on the whole wise, just as they are on the whole healthy. And each human being who feels himself weak in spirit can take a spiritual tonic or go in for spiritual gymnastics, and if he doesn't get better, why I suppose he just becomes a spiritual corpse . . . We're getting almost morbidly serious about nothing on earth. I haven't the vaguest idea what started us,—oh yes, your objection to my Mr. Dare dear. Let's go and see if tea's at four yet."

"Louise!" Miriam cried, in a half-choked voice. "What a treasure you are."

"Don't be prosy," said Louise, brushing Miriam's forehead with her lips. "That fawn thing of yours wears like iron, doesn't it. I'm in rags. If Keble gets in we'll make him stand us a trip to New York for some duds."

Miriam was grateful for the delicacy which had led Louise to terminate her homily with a flippant flourish, thus giving Miriam an opportunity to withdraw intact from the compromising currents into

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 which she had nervously forced the interview. But the tyrant felt cheated, and only subsided at the tea-table when Keble drew Miriam into a final consultation and Louise challenged Dare to a toast-eating competition.

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EFORE Louise had been an hour in the Valley she saw that the election was not going to be the "walk-over" that Pat Goard was predicting, despite the solid support which Keble was receiving at the hands of all the commercial interests. Although she could be contemptuously disregardful of public opinion, she seldom made the mistake of misreading it to her advantage, and as she moved about among groups of idlers in Main Street she intuitively discovered that there was a formidable undercurrent of opposition to her husband.

It came to her with a shock that part of the opposition was directed at herself. She knew there were people in the Valley who thought of her as a "menace". There were women who resented what they regarded as her superior airs, her new way of talking, her habit of dashing into town in an expensive motor. She found that her frivolous treatment of the far-off Watch Night service had not been forgotten, had even been exhumed by people who had boisterously profited by Keble's hospitality on the night in question. She discovered that sarcastic equivocations were being circulated regarding her "sick man" and Keble's "secretary". Further than

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 that, capital was being made of the fact that Keble had brought laborers from the east to work on his land. This was a particularly malicious weapon, since Keble had advertised months in advance for local workmen, and of the few who had offered their services, he had engaged all who qualified for the work in hand.

She made a rapid computation of her enemies, then a rapid computation of her friends. Luckily she had invited Mr. and Mrs. Boots to her house during the visit of her English guests. That had greatly strengthened the Eveley prestige among the faithful. Mrs. Boots recalled that she was the first to tell the Eveleys that they should go in for politics. Even the tongue of the mail carrier's wife had wagged less carelessly since Louise had invited Amy Sweet to dinner with a lord. Pearl Beatty, who had recently become Mrs. Jack Wallace, was a tower of strength for Keble's cause, for while the women of the Valley whispered about her, Pearl's respectability was now unchallengeable and most of her detractors owed money to Jack for ploughs and harness bought on credit. Moreover, Pearl, as a university graduate, could make the untutored respect her opinion, and she was phenomenally successful on the stump.

The opposing party had, early in the campaign, strengthened their cause by dropping the man who had represented and neglected them for so many years, and chosen as their candidate the much more

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 redoubtable Otis Swigger, proprietor of the Canada House, a director of the Witney bank, and the holder of many mortgages. Oat was a good "cusser"; he always had a chew of tobacco for any one amiable enough to listen to his anecdotes; he was generally conceded to be an enlightened citizen; and he was a typical product of his district. Moreover, he was popular enough to enlist the support of many Progressives, who had decided not to put up a candidate of their own.

For Louise, whose erratic ways of arriving at conclusions in no sense invalidated the accuracy of the conclusions arrived at, the factor which made Oat Swigger a dangerous opponent was that she had, for her own reasons, decided not to invite him and Minnie to what the Valley referred to as her "high-toned house-warming". In the drug-store Minnie had tried to pass her without speaking, her chalky chin very high in the air. Louise had grasped Minnie's shoulder, with a smile on her lips but a glint in her eye, and said, "You're getting near-sighted Minnie. How are you?"

"Oh, I'm all right, Smarty!" Minnie had retorted, and broken away. "Never better in my life!" she flung back.

"For God's sake touch wood!" Louise had screamed after her, with a wink for the man behind the counter. "You're going to vote for us, I hope," she said to him.

"Sure thing!" he agreed.

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 It was with these discoveries bubbling in her mind that she sought out Keble to present a hasty report before the "monster meeting" in the Valley town hall.

Keble and Miriam seemed to have taken stock of most of the points she had observed, but they had thought of nothing as good as the satirical counters which leaped to her tongue, and in the short interval before the meeting, Keble jotted down hints.

Of the three, Louise was the only one who was seized with misgivings when Pat Goard came to say that the hall was full and it was time to go on the platform. She held Keble back for a moment. "Do let me speak too," she pleaded.

Keble laughed and she saw a glance pass between him and Miriam which seemed to say, "That incurable theatricality cropping out again!"

"I'm afraid there's no room on the program," he said.

"As if that made any difference!" she retorted. "It wouldn't take me five minutes to say my piece."

"An extempore address might spoil everything," he remonstrated. "I'm using your suggestions; they will be the plums in my pudding."

She gave it up, but only because the glance between Miriam and Keble had abashed her. Perhaps it was mere play-acting, she rebelliously reflected, but it would be first-rate play-acting, and she had meant every word she had said weeks ago when she had

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 warned Keble that drama must be infused into politics if he wished to carry the mass.

She sat on the platform in her khaki riding suit and was startled by the volume of applause which greeted Keble when it came time for his speech. She was also cut by the hissing and booing which seemed to be concentrated in the back of the hall, where she recognized a number of hoodlums, probably paid.

She was also startled by the effectiveness of Keble's speech. It sounded honest, and she thrilled to a note of authority in his voice and a strength in his manner for which she had not given him credit. Miriam seemed not at all surprised,—but Miriam had heard him speak in public before.

The audience was attentive, at times vociferously friendly. There were occasional interruptions and aggressive questions, which Keble found no difficulty in answering. At the end there was some cheering, and as the meeting broke up scores of men and a few women came to shake hands with Keble.

Louise greeted friends and used every acquaintanceship in the interest of propaganda, but secretly she was panic-stricken. She had seen the Valley in all its moods, and she knew that this evening's hearty good will had not been fired with the enthusiasm that won Valley elections. She was afraid to meet Keble's eyes, and was glad that in his flush of triumph at the cheers and individual assurances, he failed to see her doubt.

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 They reached the doctor's house late in the evening, and went straight to bed in order to be fresh for the strenuous day at Witney. Louise did not sleep. She was haunted by the sight of earnest, slightly puzzled, friendly and unfriendly faces, and by the sound of jeers. Her brain revolved a dozen schemes, and before she fell asleep she had drawn up a private plan of campaign.

After breakfast she went to the bank and cashed a cheque. Then she made a round of the garages and stables and hired every available conveyance. While Keble was talking with groups of men in the town, she was using every minute, unknown to him, to collect influential members of the community and make them promise to travel to Witney for the final rally that evening. The cars and wagons were to leave an hour after her husband's departure. Nothing was to be said to him about the scheme, for she was reserving it as a surprise. Her conscience told her it was what Keble would spurn as "flummery". Well, it was a flummery world.

After dinner at the Majestic Hotel in Witney, followed by anteroom interviews, Keble and his band of supporters, to the blare of trumpets which made Miriam conceal a smile, proceeded to the Arena, a wooden edifice with a false front rising proudly above the highest telephone poles. Flags, posters, slogans, confetti, and peanut shells abounded. There were argumentative groups outside the doors, while within, every available seat was taken and already

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 there was talk of an overflow meeting. Louise had had the satisfaction of seeing her phenomenal procession of cars, wagons, and beribboned citizens from the Valley swarm into the town, headed by the Valley band. It had taken all her skill to prevent Keble from discovering the ruse. Later on he would find out and be furious. For the moment she didn't care what he thought. Besides, it wasn't bribery to offer people a lift over a distance of thirty-five miles to listen to a speech. She wasn't bribing them to vote; they could vote for or against, as their feelings should dictate after she had got through with them. Moreover, even if it was trickery, she had used her own money,—not Keble's. She smiled at the reflection that Walter's predictions were coming true; how it would have amused him to see her being, with a vengeance, "one decent member of society"!

The applause on Keble's appearance was not deafening. After all, Witney was less well acquainted with Keble than the Valley, even though it had pleasant recollections of the compliments uttered by his father from the back platform of a governmental railway carriage. Keble's address was similar to former addresses, though throughout this final day he had brought together concise counter arguments to new attacks, and had prepared a damaging criticism of his opponent's latest rosy promises. He was more than cordially received, but again Louise felt the absence of enthusiasm which represents the margin of a majority.

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 When he had resumed his seat, Mr. Goard, in accordance with a secret plan, called on Mrs. Eveley, to the amazement of Miriam and Keble, and to the wonderment of the big audience, who had had three serious speeches to digest and who sensed in the new move a piquant diversion.

"Last night," Louise began, "I asked my husband to let me speak at the Valley mass meeting, and he objected. So, ladies and gentlemen, to-night, I didn't ask his permission at all. I asked Mr. Goard's, and as you all know, Pat Goard could never resist a lady."

Already she had changed the mind of a score of men who had been on the point of leaving the hall.

"I wouldn't give my husband away by telling you he refused, unless it illustrated a point I wish to make. The point is that no matter how hard a man objects,—and the better they are the more they do object,—his wife always takes her own way in the end. Not only that, ladies and gentlemen, but the wife adds much more color to her husband's public policies than the public realizes. You've heard the proverb about the hand that rocks the cradle. I don't for a second claim that the average wife is capable of thinking out a political platform; certainly I couldn't; but she is like the irritating fly that goads the horse into a direction that he didn't at all know he was going to take. What it all boils down to is this: when you elect Keble Eveley at the polls to-morrow, you'll elect me too. And if you were by any mischance to elect Oat Swigger, you'd be elect-

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 ing Minnie Swigger. Minnie Swigger is a jolly good girl, one of my oldest friends. But the point is, ladies and gentlemen, I can lick Minnie!"

Shouts of laughter interrupted her. Miriam and Keble had ceased being shocked. However much they might deprecate her sops to the groundlings, they were hypnotized by her control of the mass which had a few minutes earlier been heterogeneous and capricious. Her direct personal allusions had dispelled a hampering ceremoniousness that had prevailed all evening.

"Once when we were girls together at the Valley school," Louise continued, seeing that her audience appreciated the reference to Mrs. Swigger. "I did lick her. I had more hair for her to pull, and she made the most of it. But I had a champion's uppercut. Now gentlemen, when you go to the polls to-morrow, don't back the wrong girl."

She took a step nearer the row of lamps and held them by a change of mood. "A little while ago somebody said that Keble Eveley was a dude. If he were, his wife would be a dude too; and though I've come up against a lot of rough characters in my time, nobody has yet been mean enough to call me a dude to my face; things said behind your back don't count. So now, man to man, is there anybody here who has the nerve to call us dudes? If there is let him say it now, or forever hold his peace."

There was a silence, then a shuffling sound directed attention to a corner, whence a facetious voice

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 called out, "His father's a sure enough dude, ain't he?"

Louise darted a glance to see who had spoken, paused a moment, smiled, and took the audience into her confidence. "It's Matt Hardy," she announced. "Matt's a clever boy (Matt was fifty and weighed fifteen stone), but like many clever people he overshoots the mark. Matt says Keble Eveley's father is a dude; and his obvious implication is that we are therefore dudes. For the sake of argument, let's admit that Lord Eveley is a dude"

"A damn fine dude at that," interposed a friendly voice.

"A damn fine dude," echoed Louise. "We'll admit that." She wheeled around with dramatic suddenness, facing Matt's corner. "Now Matt Hardy's father used to live in Utah. The obvious implication is that Matt is a Mormon with six concealed wives."

There was a howl of enjoyment while the discomfited Matthew tried to maintain a good-humored front against the nudges with which his neighbours plagued him. The success of the sally lay in the fact that every one knew Matt for a bachelor who paid his taxes and enjoyed an immaculate reputation.

Louise's spirits rose as she leaned forward over the lights and focused attention again by a gesture of her arms.

"It doesn't in the least matter whether we're dudes or not," she said. "You're going to elect us anyway. Bye and bye I'll tell you why. My husband told you

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 some of the reasons, but there are a lot of others he hadn't time to touch on. Never mind that now. Before I get to the reasons I must sweep the ground clear of objections. That's the quickest way. I've disposed of one. Are there any other objections to us as your representatives in the Legislative Assembly? Any more objections, Matt?"

Matt was still smarting. He had been harboring a desire for revenge. But his wits stood still under provocation.

"Matt's cartridges are used up," she announced, turning away.

"No they're not," he shouted, with a sudden inspiration. "You're French."

His voice was drowned by a chorus of jeers. Louise motioned for silence, then smiled imperturbably. "That's what Minnie Swigger said, ladies and gentlemen. That's what we fought about. And Minnie was half right. But only half. She overlooked the fact that me mother was Irish!"

The success of this was almost too great. It threatened to rob the session of its seriousness. After the first delight had simmered down, individuals were suddenly seized with a recollection of the wink and the brogue and burst into renewed guffaws or slapped their legs with resounding thwacks.

Louise saw the necessity of counteracting this levity, and for several minutes talked straight at the issue, pointing out the practical changes that had come about as a result of her husband's efforts to

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 civilize and develop his district, and the far-reaching improvements that he, of all people, was in a position to effectuate. She heard herself enunciating facts and generalizations which had never occurred to her before. Once again, as in the case of Billy Salter's funeral, she found herself thinking in public more rapidly and concisely than she had ever thought in private. And under the surface of it all was a wonderment that she should be so passionately supporting Keble in a plan that had been distasteful to her.

Only once she relieved the tenseness by another flash of humor, when, referring to the candidature of Otis Swigger, she said that while Oat's barber shop in the Valley had always been recognized as a public forum, Oat would be at a distinct disadvantage in Parliament, because he couldn't lather the faces of the other members, consequently no one would be obliged to listen to him.

She brought her address to a climax with the instinct of an orator, just when the whole audience had settled down comfortably for more.

She paused a moment, exulting in the silence, then, changing from an earnest to a girlish manner, she dropped her arms and said quietly, "Well, ladies and gentlemen, you still have twelve hours to think over the truth of all I've said. Are you going to vote for us?"

The answer was in an affirmative that shook the rafters of the Arena and made Miriam turn pale.

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 The air was charged with an enthusiasm which for Louise, as she sank back exhausted, spelt Majority. Keble was forced to acknowledge the prolonged acclamation, and Pat Goard quickly followed up the advantage with a few words of dismissal.

Excitement and lack of sleep, following on her long ordeal, had overtaxed Louise. She felt weak and a little frightened as she walked towards a side door in a deserted back room of the building, followed by Keble, who came running to overtake.

"I know it was cheap," she quickly forestalled him, "but I couldn't help it." He seemed to have been subdued by the pandemonium she had let loose, as though suddenly aware that he had been satisfied with too little until she gave a demonstration of what pitch enthusiasm could and must be raised to. "It's my love of acting," she added. "I hope you weren't annoyed."

Keble was in the grip of a retrospective panic. "Why am I always finding things out so late!" he cried, with a profound appeal in his voice. "I'm always walking near a precipice in the fog. Why can't I see the things you see?"

Her fatigue made her a little hysterical. "Why do you keep your eyes shut?" she retorted.

A cloud of feeling that had been growing heavier for weeks burst and deluged Keble with the sense of what his wife meant to him. He saw what a jabber all social intercourse might become should she withhold her interpretative affection from him or ex-

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 pend it elsewhere. He had long been restive under her continued use of the weapon of polite negativity with which he had originally defended himself against her impulsiveness. Now he longed to recapture the sources of the old impulsiveness, to defend them as his rarest possession, and his longing was redoubled by a fear that it was too late.

"Why" he commenced, but his voice broke and he reached out his arms. It was dark. She was dazed, and seemed to ward him off.

"Then what made you do it?" he finally contrived to say. "You've saved the day, if it can be saved. Not that it really matters. Why? Why? Why not have let me blunder along to defeat, like the silly ass I am?"

"No woman likes to see her husband beaten," she replied, in tired, tearful tones, "by a barber!" she added.

"Louise!" he implored, in a welter of hopes, fears, and longings that made him for once brutally incautious. He caught her into his arms, then marvelled at the limpness of her body. He turned her face to the dim light, and saw that she had fainted.

Not until Dare had been driven to Witney, there to entrain for the coast, did Louise give in to the weariness with which she had been contending for many days prior to Keble's election. Only her determination to spare Dare the knowledge that she had

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 overtaxed her strength for him kept her from yielding sooner. On the day of his departure she retired to her bedroom, drew the blinds, got into bed, and gave an order that nobody should be admitted. They might interpret her retirement as grief at Dare's departure if they chose; for the moment she didn't care a tinker's dam what any one thought.

Aunt Denise discouraged Keble's immediate attempt to telephone for Dr. Bruneau. "She doesn't need medicine," she said, "but rest. Leave her to me; I understand her temperament."

Once more Keble and Miriam could only pool their helplessness.

"We had better leave matters in her hands," Miriam decided. "The Bruneaus seem to be infallible in cases of illness."

Keble was only half reassured. "Usually when Louise has a headache that would drive any ordinary person mad, she goes out and climbs Hardscrapple. I have a good mind to telephone in spite of Aunt Denise."

"If you do," said Miriam, "Louise will be furious, and that will only make matters worse. It's merely exhaustion. Even I have seen it coming."

"I wish to God I'd fetched a nurse from Harristown when Dare was ill."

"Louise wouldn't have given up her patient if you had imported a dozen."

Keble was vexed and bitterly unhappy. "What are you going to do with a woman like that!" he

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 cried. "I don't mind her having her own way; but damn it all, I object to her doing things that half kill her. That's stupid."

One of the most difficult lessons Miriam had learnt in her long discipleship under Louise was how and when to be generous. She saw an opportunity and breathed more freely. "I think it's cruel of you to call her sacrifice stupid. If she breaks down it is not that she has undertaken too much; but that other people undertake so little. When Louise resolved to nurse Dare she did it because there was, as she said to me, no one else. But during that period she was putting the best brain-work into our campaign. The minute she was free she went to the Valley, worked like a horse, and turned the tide single-handed because, as she might have put it, there was nobody else. She thinks and acts for us all. It isn't our fault if we are not alert enough to live up to her standard, but the least we can do when she becomes a victim to our sluggishness is to refrain from blaming her."

"Well, Miriam, I give it up! I don't understand Louise; I don't understand Aunt Denise; I don't even understand you. You women have one set of things to say for publication, and then disclose amendments which alter the color of the published reports. Each new disclosure rings true, yet they don't piece together into anything recognizable. I no sooner get my sails set than the breeze shifts. . . . There's only one thing left for me to do, and

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 that is to go on as I began, just crawling along like a tortoise, colliding into everything sooner or later. By the time I'm eighty I may have learned something and got somewhere. If not I'll just stumble into my grave, and on my tombstone they can write, 'Poor devil, he meant well'."

Miriam had been laughing at the funny aspect of his misery, but her smile became grim. "That isn't a bad epitaph. I wish I could be sure that I'll be entitled to one as good."

Keble glanced at her curiously. "You're morbid, Miriam. I don't wonder, with the monotony of our life here."

"No," she corrected, despite the tyrant. "The life here has done more than anything to cure me of morbidness. Although, to tell the truth, I wasn't conscious of the morbid streak in me until after I'd been here for a while." To herself Miriam explained the matter with the help of a photographic metaphor: Keble's personality had been a solution which brought out an alluring but reprehensible image on the negative of her heart; Louise's character had been a solution which had gradually brought out a series of surrounding images which threw the reprehensible image into the right proportion, subordinating it to the background without in any way dimming it. Miriam was now forced to admit that one overture on Keble's part, one token of a tyrant within him that reciprocated the desire of

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 her tyrant, would have sufficed to overthrow all her scruples.

"I don't see what you mean," said Keble.

Miriam thought for a moment. "You deserve an explanation. I can't explain it all; it's too personal." She had almost said too humiliating. "But I'll make a partial confession. Louise imported me here long ago as a sort of tutor, at her expense. You weren't to know; but it can't do any harm to give the game away now. While I was supposed to be tutoring her, I was really learning. By watching Louise I've learned the beauty of unselfishness, trite as that may sound. I can't be unselfish on Louise's scale, for I can't be anything on her scale, good, bad, or indifferent. But like you I can mean well, and since I've known Louise I can mean better.

"You sometimes speak of Louise's play-acting. When your people were here we once said that she was having a lovely time showing off. I know better now. I'm convinced that she was trying, in her own way, to reflect distinction on you, just as I'm convinced that when she jerrymandered the proletariat she was going it in the face of bodily discomfort and your disapproval simply because she couldn't bear the thought of your being disappointed. I don't think either of us has given Louise enough credit for disinterestedness, chiefly because she doesn't give herself credit for it. She prates so much about her individual rights, that we assume her incapable of sacrificing them. At times we've mistaken

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 her pride for indifference. Do look back and see if that isn't so. I'm inclined to think that even her present illness is merely the nervous strain consequent upon some splendid reticence."

Miriam paused, unable to confess that the reticence had to do with herself, as she suspected it had. She saw that she had permission to go on.

"Then her interest in Dare. That, you and I have avoided referring to, and I think we were a little hypocritical. But the core of the secret is connected with Dare, and I can't do Louise the injustice of not telling you. It was unpardonable of me to listen, but I did. I was in the sun-parlor, in the hammock, dozing, and she and Dare came and sat by the fire in the hall. The door was open."

"When was this?"

"Only yesterday. They were talking about the elections. 'When I saw all those idiots wavering between Oat Swigger and Keble,' she said, 'something snapped. From that moment I had only one determination: to make them feel the worth of all the things Keble stood for in the universe' . . . The conversation swung around to the monkey. She told Dare, as she had long ago told me, that before the monkey arrived she hoped he would be a boy, not for her sake, but to gratify his grandfathers. Then when he did turn out a boy, she was amazed to find herself thankful for your sake. The grandfathers were forgotten, but she was indifferent. Then after the elections she was for the first time

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 conscious of cherishing the monkey for her own sake. That feeling grew until she suddenly resented your rights in him. Then yesterday she took it into her head to bathe the monkey, and had an insane delusion that she could wash off his heredity,—scrubbed like a charwoman till the poor darling howled. 'Then,' she said, 'I was sorry, and by the time I had got on all his shirts I felt that I had put his heredities on again, and was glad and kissed him and he flapped his arms and squealed. Then I cried, because, deep down, I was terrified that perhaps Keble might some day, if he hasn't already, resent my contribution to the monkey'."

Miriam waited. "I couldn't resist passing on that monologue to you, for it seems the most complete answer to many criss-cross questions, and Louise might never have brought herself to let you see. It would be impudent of me to say all this had we not formed a habit out here of being so criss-crossly communicative, and if you hadn't tacitly given me a big sister's licence. Anyway, there it is, for what it's worth. At least I mean well."

Keble was too strangely moved to trust his voice, and walked out of the house to ride over the rain-soaked roads.

That was the most bitter moment that Miriam had ever experienced. She had come to know that Keble had no emotion to spare for her; but that he should fail to see into her heart, or, seeing, refuse

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 her the barest little sign of understanding and compassion,—it was really not quite fair.

She had letters to write. She had decided to leave, but apart from that her plans were uncertain. Her most positive aim was to avoid living with her old-fashioned aunt in Philadelphia. Grimly she looked forward to a process of gradual self-effacement. In two or three years she would probably not receive invitations to the bigger houses. Then there would be some hot little flat in Washington, on the Georgetown side, with occasional engagements to give lessons in something,—at best a post as social secretary to the wife of some new Cabinet Member full of her importance. Something dependent, and dingy. Each year would add its quota to an accumulation of dust on the shelves of her heart. And with a sigh she would take down from a shelf and from time to time reread this pathetic romance in the wilderness. From time to time she would receive impulsive invitations from Louise, and would invent excuses for declining. Perhaps, some years hence, when she could view the episode with some degree of impersonality and humor, she would write a long letter of confession to Louise. In advance she was sure of absolution. That was her only comfort.

Dare had guessed her secret, and she had been too hypocritical to take him into her confidence. Now that he was gone she regretted that she had not been flexible enough to enter into the spirit of his overture. By evading, she had not only screened her

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 own soul, but denied commiseration to him. In future she would try to be more alert to such cues. She wondered whether inflexibility might not have had a good deal to do with the barrenness of her life. She even wondered whether at thirty-five one would be ridiculous in vowing to become flexible,—would that be savoring too strongly of the old maids in farces?

From her window, as she was patting her hair into place before going down to tea, she caught sight of Keble's tall, clean figure dismounting at the edge of the meadow. Katie was passing along the road with the perambulator, and Keble went out of his way to greet the monkey. His high boots were splashed with mud. His belted raincoat emphasized the litheness of his body. The face that bent over the carriage glowed from sharp riding against the damp air. The monkey was trying to pull off the peak of his father's cap, and Keble was pretending to be an ogre. Katie looked on indulgently.

"Even Katie," thought Miriam, "puts more into life than I do." A few months before, Miriam would have thought, "gets more out of it."

The mail had been delayed by the state of the roads. Miriam found a letter from London. When tea was poured she read as follows:

"My dear Miss Cread: I don't know whether you are still at Hillside or whether you will be at all interested in the suggestion I am about to make, but I am writing on the off chance. My old friend

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 Aurelie Graybridge is leaving soon on a visit to America. Yesterday, during a chat with her, I happened to mention your name. She recalled having met you some years ago, and inquired minutely after you. She has been looking for a companion to help her keep the run of her committees, and so forth. For several years a cousin was with her, but her cousin married and that leaves her with no one. I suggested that you might be induced to go to her, and she asked me to sound you.

"You would divide your time between England and the continent. The duties would be light, chiefly correspondence. A good deal of spare time; travelling and all expenses provided, and a decent allowance.

"Aurelie plans to sail next week. I'm enclosing her address. Please write her if the idea appeals to you. I hope it may, for that will mean that I shall be likely to see you from time to time. You may of course have much more interesting plans, in which case don't mind this gratuitous scrawl."

It was signed by Alice Eveley. Miriam restored the letter to its envelope, and was thankful that Keble and Aunt Denise were too occupied to notice her face.

Her anger was redoubled by the realization that the offer was too good to be turned down. She knew she would end by despatching an amiably worded letter to Mrs. Graybridge, then write Keble's

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 sister a note thanking her for her kind thoughtfulness.

"The cat! Oh, the cat!" she was saying under her breath.

In the third week of December Keble returned to Hillside after his first session in the Provincial Assembly. He had been loth to leave his wife at the ranch, but she had been too weak to accompany him and was still somewhat less energetic than she had formerly been. Keble found her on a divan in her own sitting room, with the monkey propped up beside her.

"It's just as you said it would be," he remarked. "Having to waste precious weeks in that dull hole makes the ranch so unbelievably wonderful a place to come back to!"

When the first questions had been answered, Louise held up a prettily bound little volume from which she had been reading. "Look! A Christmas present already,—from Walter Windrom. A collection of his own verse."

Keble admired it, then Louise, in a tone which she succeeded in making casual, said, indicating one of the pages, "That's a strange sort of poem, the one called 'Constancy'. Whatever made Walter write a thing like that?"

Keble read the poem. "I've seen it before. It's

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 quite an old one. Girlie clipped it from some review or other and sent it to me."

"What does it mean?" Louise insisted.

"How should I know?" he laughed. "Girlie had a theory about it. Walter was smitten with an American actress for a while,—what was her name? Myra something: Myra Pelter. She treated him rather shabbily. Took his present, then threw him down for somebody else, I believe, after they'd been rather thicker, as a matter of fact, than Girlie quite knew. Walter is romantic, you know, for all his careful cynicism; he's always singing the praises of bad lots, and that makes Girlie wild, naturally. Girlie said the poem was Walter's attempt to justify this Myra person's uppish treatment of him, an attempt to make her out a lady with duties to art,—all that sort of blether. It's Girlie's prosaic imagination: she can never read a book or a poem without trying to fit it, word for word, into the author's private life. I had quite forgotten its existence."

It was difficult for Louise to conceal her relief after years of pent-up unhappiness caused by her over-subjective interpretation of the poem's mission. "How could a man as clever as Walter ever take Myra Pelter and her art seriously. Miriam and I went to see her once. She's only a Japanese doll!"

"Dolls are an important institution. They have turned wiser heads than Walter's."

Louise looked again at the historical lines. "I hate it," she mildly remarked.

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 "Tell Walter so—not me!"

"Oh no," she sighed. "The poor little lines meant well enough."

While her remark did not make sense to him, it seemed an echo of something he had once said to himself; it brought a dim recollection of pain.

"But I would tell him at a pinch," she continued. "I'm no doll that says only the ugly things for which you press a button in its back!"

"Ungainly sentence, that!"

He remembered now. It was the ghostly little gramaphone record, that had brought him a message about Dare.

"It's an ungainly subject," she retorted, absent-mindedly.

"Change it then. There's always the monkey."

"Yes, there's him. Aren't you glad?"

"Rather! . . . I don't suppose anything could be done about his legs. They're as curved as hoops. If he ever tries to make a goal he'll have to stand facing the side-lines and kick sideways like a crab."

Louise buried her nose in the monkey's fragrant dress and shook him into laughter. She was languidly wondering where her own goal was, whether it was still ahead or whether, as Walter had so discouragingly predicted, she would find it at her starting post. She was happy; but she suspected that she was happy only for the moment. The complacence with which Keble had accepted their revival of interest in each other was already stirring a little sing-

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 ing restlessness of nerves within her. He so had the air of having won the race. Perhaps he had, and perhaps he always would. But she was none the less hare-like, for all that! She looked into the monkey's eyes. "Tell your daddy," she said, "the important thing is to make the goal,—whether you do it sideways or frontways or whatever old ways!"

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 If he refuses to sell at five cents. per pound in Kansas City, he may reload his stock and ship it to the Chicago Stock Yards, belonging to the same trust, and sell them for a nickle per pound. By the time he has deducted feed bills and additional transportation charges, he can be glad that his cattle pass entitles him to a return trip home.

The cattle man is only the owner of the first few links in the chain of production. The ownership of land and cattle does not prevent his exploitation by the Armours, Swifts and Sulzbergers, who own the packing houses and the market facilities. On his way to the consumer he finds his road blocked by the capitalist owner of the greater means of production, who says, "Stand and deliver."

Sometimes cattle are high and sometimes low. Some cattlemen make money, others go into bankruptcy. But on an average the cow man receives enough for his stock to keep him alive and in working condition to raise more steers for the meat trust.

King Cotton, Queen Poverty, Prime Minister Hunger and Court Chaplain Ignorance rule the cotton states

Cotton is the devil's own crop. It takes thirteen months out of the twelve and all the children out of school to raise a cotton crop.

Raw cotton on the farm has no more value than ice on the North Pole. To prepare cotton for the consumer it must go through

The cotton raiser may be the proud owner of land, mules, implements, cotton bags, and children, but the cotton gin, the compress, the railroad, the cotton mill, the clothing factory and the store belong to Mr. Capitalist, and this gentleman sets the price of cotton and regulates the price of clothing. The result is that the cotton raiser's family, who produce enough cotton in one season to clothe themselves for a life time, are forced to dress in rags and shoddy. In a pinch the hog raiser may eat his own hog. The wheat farmer can take his wheat


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IS monstrous fine," said Mehitable Condit, out of a long silence, "only—think you the left eye is not a trifle higher than the right?"

The little old man to whom she spoke leaned back upon his stool at this, the better to stare anxiously at a wooden sign propped upon a rush-bottomed chair facing him. Mehitable's younger sister, Charity, a slender, pretty girl standing behind him, gazed worriedly at the sign, too. A moment passed while critical inspection of the rather crude painting—that of a horse's head—held them motionless. They made a quaint group, for this was in the year of 1779, and brave was the little old man in blue velvet breeches, wine-colored vest, lace ruffles to his shirt sleeves and with a comical pigtail so tightly braided it stood straight out from the back of his head. The two girls were more soberly clad in plain, homespun gowns and long, heavy capes, back-flung over their shoulders,


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 while an old lady, cozily ensconced in an arm chair near-by, benignly watching the artist over a pair of gray socks she was knitting, was also garbed in homespun. It was a comfortable scene. Only the fire in the great fireplace seemed to roar defiance to the snow-threatening sky outside the window.

Finally, the old man, sighing, took up his paint brush once more and applied it gingerly to the painting. Then, leaning back, he squinted professionally through his half-closed fist. Soberly, the two sisters imitated him, though they could not see that it helped in the least. One eye of the horse most assuredly was out of place—no amount of squinting could alter that!

At last, Dame Wright startled everyone. At her merry laugh, the three hands dropped and three sheepish faces turned to meet her quizzical glance.

"Ma faith—an yo' knew hoo queerlike yo' all looked!" she chuckled. "A body wad think yo' were a' at sea, makin' spyglasses oot o' yer hands sae!"

Her husband looked over at her reproachfully. "Noo, Mither," he answered in an injured tone, tis thus the real artists always do! Dinna yo' ken we were doin' nobbut lookin' at you sign sic Hitty, here, said ain eye o' the horse were higher than t'other!" Leaning forward, he dabbed hastily for a moment, then he glanced triumphantly at Mehitable. "Noo, Hitty—hoo be it?"


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 By some happy chance, he had gotten the misfit eye to respond to his coaxing brush. Mehitable clapped her hands.

"Well done, Master Wright!" she cried cordially. "Indeed," she hurried on, while Charity smilingly added her little chirp of praise, "I know not how ye thought o' such a clever sign for the Horse's Neck Tavern!"

A flush of pride suffused the old man's face; but he shook his head. "It be nowt!" he answered, with false modesty. "Gin yo' do a thing lang enough, lassie, yo' canna help doin' it weel! Like Mither tendin' her geese," he added slyly. "A bonnier flock nor a more expert goose girl yo' will search far to find. And why? Experience, Hitty, time and patience—I ha' been a-paintin' signs and Mither ha' been tendin' her geese for many, many years! Time and patience can do all things, they say. Aiblins they be richt!

Master Wright turned and looked away, as though he could see, through the walls of his kitchen, that little village in old Scotland where his apprenticeship had been served under a hard taskmaster whose "weel done" he had never heard because, with youthful impatience, he had run away.

"Time and patience!" he repeated, sighing. "I might hae been a court painter, who knows, 'stead o' a struggling farmer and occasional sign painter


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 an I had had a smattering o' either, wi' a little sense, besides!"

But Mehitable moved impatiently. "Aye, mayhap," she shrugged, sensing a reproof beneath his words, for she well knew her impetuous ways were criticized by the old Scotch couple. "Mayhap—yet patience was ne'er a favorite o' mine, so I fear me I shall excel in nothing—not even geese-tending!"

As usual, gentle Charity hastened to smooth over her sister's words. "Is't true, sir," she interposed in her quiet little voice, "that the Horse's Neck Tavern between Newark and Paulus Hook was quite destroyed by the British?"

"Aye." Master Wright, who had been staring not overly pleased at Mehitable, turned with a brightening face to Charity. "It be true." He fell busily to work again. "It all happened from a silly brawl—the Hessians, as is their custom each time at bread-baking time, brought some o' their camp women to coax, or coerce, the Jersey wives to bestow half o' their bakin' upon them. But mine host had grown tired o' the custom and refused—foolishly, yo' ken. So they burned his tavern to the ground. Noo this sign be for his new home, though the gude mon, e'en wi' his neighbors' help, hae scarcely finished it. Yet I shall be busy wi' my spring plantin' aiblins when he wants


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 it, sae I be doin' it noo. And hoo does yer fayther get on wi' his work?"

"Oh, he be ever busy, an not outside, then inside!" It was Mehitable who answered her host's question; but her tone was absent. She was staring out of the window at the snowflakes which were beginning to drift down from the leaden sky. "Cherry, what say ye! Had we not better start? I fear me there be a bad storm brewing!"

"Aye, 'tis true!" Charity, too, gave an anxious glance out at the snowflakes as she pulled her heavy cape up over her shoulders and followed her sister to Dame Wright's chair to make her manners before departure.

"Not goin' to bide a wee wi' us!" exclaimed the old lady, laying down her knitting. "Think yo' better not bide till the storm be over?" she queried hospitably.

"Nay!" laughed Mehitable. "The storm might last for a day or so, good Mistress Wright. And our mother would be worried, forsooth!"

"Weel, then,"—Dame Wright leaned forward in her chair and reached for a little rash-woven basket which stood upon an adjacent table—"weel, then, gie this to your mother, my dear. It be nobbut a wee bit o' Scotch cake, for which she asked the receipt. See—I ha' written it and placed it upon the bottom o' the basket." She lifted the napkin