rom hoarseness--his mother said it was a psychological hoarseness at a
moment when he realised overwhelmingly how he hated it all--Jeff had
taken his place and "got" the men, labourers all of them, as Alston
never had.

"It's a mistake," said Mrs. Choate afterward when he came to the house
to report, and ask how Alston was, and the three sat eating one of
Mary's quick suppers. "You're really the candidate. Those men know it.
They know it's you behind Alston, and they're going to take him
patiently because you tell them to. But they don't half want him."

Jeff was very fine now in his robustness, fit and strong, no fat on him
and good blood racing well. He was eating bread and butter heartily,
while he waited for Mary to serve him savoury things, and Mrs. Choate
looked discontentedly at Mary bending over his plate, all hospitality,
with the greater solicitude because he was helping Alston out. Mrs.
Choate wished the nugatory Esther were out of the way, and she could
marry Mary off to Jeff. Mary, pale, yet wholesome, fair-haired, with the
definite Choate profile, and dressed in her favourite smoke colour and
pale violet, her mother loved conscientiously, if impatiently. But she
wished Mary, who had not one errant inclination, might come to her some
day and say, "Mother, I am desperately enamoured of an Italian
fruit-seller with Italy in his eyes." Mrs. Choate would have explained
to her, with a masterly common-sense, that such vagrom impulses meant,
followed to conclusions, shipwreck on the rocks of class
misunderstanding; but it would have warmed her heart to Mary to have so
to explain. But here was Mary to whom no eccentricity ever had to be
elucidated. She could not even have imagined a fruit-seller outside his
heaven-decreed occupation of selling fruit. Mrs. Choate smiled a little
to herself, wondering what Mary would say if she could know her mother
was willing to consign the inconvenient Esther to perpetual limbo and
marry her to handsome Jeff. "Mother!" she could imagine her horrified
cry. It would all be in that.

Jeff was more interested in his eating than in answering Mrs. Choate
with more than an encouraging:

"We've got 'em, I think. But I wish," he said, "we had more time to
follow up Weedie. What's he saying to 'em?"

"Ask Madame Beattie," said Alston, with more distaste than he could keep
out of his voice. "I saw her last night on the outskirts of his crowd,
sitting in Denny's hack."

"Speaking?" ask