ed Jeff. "She'd have spoken, if she got half a chance."

Alston laughed quietly.

"Moore got the better of her. He was in his car. All he had to do was to
make off. She made after him, but he's got the whip-hand, with a car."

The next night, doubtless taught the advisability of vying with her
enemy, Madame Beattie, to the disgust of Esther, came down cloaked and
muffled to the chin and took the one automobile to be had for hire in
Addington. She was whirled away, where Esther had no idea. She was
whirled back again at something after ten, hoarse yet immensely tickled.
But Reardon knew what she had done and he telephoned it to Esther. She
was making speeches of her own, stopping at street corners wherever she
could gather a group, but especially running down to the little streets
by the water where the foreign labourers came swarming out and cheered
her.

"It's disgraceful," said Esther, almost crying into the telephone. "What
is she saying to them?"

"Nobody knows, except it's political. We assume that," said Reardon.
"All kinds of lingo. They tell me she knows more languages than a
college professor."

"Find out," Esther besought him. "Ask her. Ask whom you shall vote for.
It'll get her started."

That seemed to Reardon a valuable idea, and he actually did ask her,
lingering before the door one night when she came out to take her car.
He put her into it with a florid courtesy she accepted as her due--it
was the best, she thought, the man had to offer--and then said to her
jocosely:

"Well, Madame Beattie, who shall I vote for?"

Madame Beattie looked at him an instant with a quizzical comprehension
it was too dark for him to see.

"I can tell whom you'd better not vote for," she said. "Don't vote for
Esther. Tell him to go on."

Reardon did tell the man and then stood there on the pavement a moment,
struck by the certainty that he had been warned. She seemed to him to
know everything. She must know he was somehow likely to get into trouble
over Esther. Reardon was bewitched with Esther, but he did so want to be
safe. Nevertheless, led by man's destiny, he walked up to the door and
Esther, as before, let him in. He thought it only fair to tell her he
had found out nothing, and he meant, in a confused way, to let her see
that things must be "all right" between them. By this he meant that they
must both be safe. But once within beside her perfumed presence--yet
Esther used no vulgar helps to provoke the sen