hrase, "All in a lifetime." Thinking over things quite alone in
his easy-chair, he would sometimes rise up with these words on his
lips, and smile sheepishly as he did so. Conscience was not by any
means dead in him. His sympathies, if anything, were keener than
ever.

This man, three times Congressman from the district of which
Columbus was a part, and twice United States Senator, had never
married. In his youth he had had a serious love affair, but there was
nothing discreditable to him in the fact that it came to nothing. The
lady found it inconvenient to wait for him. He was too long in earning
a competence upon which they might subsist.

Tall, straight-shouldered, neither lean nor stout, he was to-day an
imposing figure. Having received his hard knocks and endured his
losses, there was that about him which touched and awakened the
sympathies of the imaginative. People thought him naturally agreeable,
and his senatorial peers looked upon him as not any too heavy
mentally, but personally a fine man.

His presence in Columbus at this particular time was due to the
fact that his political fences needed careful repairing. The general
election had weakened his party in the State Legislature. There were
enough votes to re-elect him, but it would require the most careful
political manipulation to hold them together. Other men were
ambitious. There were a half-dozen available candidates, any one of
whom would have rejoiced to step into his shoes. He realized the
exigencies of the occasion. They could not well beat him, he thought;
but even if this should happen, surely the President could be induced
to give him a ministry abroad.

Yes, he might be called a successful man, but for all that Senator
Brander felt that he had missed something. He had wanted to do so many
things. Here he was, fifty-two years of age, clean, honorable, highly
distinguished, as the world takes it, but single. He could not help
looking about him now and then and speculating upon the fact that he
had no one to care for him. His chamber seemed strangely hollow at
times--his own personality exceedingly disagreeable.

"Fifty!" he often thought to himself. "Alone--absolutely
alone."

Sitting in his chamber that Saturday afternoon, a rap at his door
aroused him. He had been speculating upon the futility of his
political energy in the light of the impermanence of life and
fame.

"What a great fight we make to sustain ourselves!" he thought. "How