of human
companionship on which she had based her future seemed suddenly
annihilated. She was alone and life was before her.

Then, as she turned her gaze, a man's figure broke upon the field of
snow, coming towards her. It was Dudley Webb, and in the resolute swing
of his carriage, in the resistless ardour of his eyes, he seemed to
reach her from east and west, from north and south, surrounding her with
a warmth of summer.

As he looked at her he held out his arms.

"Eugie--poor girl! dear girl!"

In the desolation of her life he stood to her as the hearth of home to
a wanderer in the frozen North.

For an instant she held back, and then, with a sob, she yielded.

"I must be loved," she said. "I must be loved or I shall die."

Around them the winter landscape reddened as the sunset broke, and above
their heads the crows flew, cawing, across the snow.

BOOK IV

THE MAN AND THE TIMES

I

The Democratic State Convention had taken an hour's recess. From the
doors of the opera house of Powhatan City the assembled delegates
emerged, heated, clamorous, out of breath. The morning session, despite
its noise, had not been interesting--awaiting the report of the
Committee on Credentials, the panting body had fumed away the opening
hours. Of the fifteen hundred representatives of absent voters, the
favoured few who had held the floor had been needlessly discursive and
undeniably dull. There had been overmuch of the party platform, and an
absence of the wit which is the soul of political speaking; and, though
the average Virginia Convention is able to breast triumphantly the most
encompassing wave of oratory, the present one had shown unmistakable
signs of suffocation. At the end of the third speech, metaphor had
failed to move it, and alliteration had ceased to evoke applause. It had
heard without emotion similes that concerned the colour of Cleopatra's
hair, and had yawned through perorations that ranged from Socrates to
the Senior Senator, who sat upon the stage. Attacks upon the "cormorants
and harpies that roost in Wall Street" had roused no thrill in the mind
of the majority that knew not rhetoric. The most patient of the silent
members had observed that "after all, their business was to nominate a
candidate for governor," while the unruly spirits, as they brandished
palm-leaf fans, had wished "that blamed committee would come on."

Now, after hours of restless waiting, they emerged, stiff-kneed a