his will. And he swallowed a third of his firewater at
a gulp and went to find her. He knew what he should find,--an Esther who
bade him remember, by all the pliancy of her attractive body and every
tone of her voice, how irreconcilably hard it was that she should have a
husband pardoned out of prison, a husband of whom she was afraid.

Lydia found Anne waiting at the gate.

"Why, where've you been?" asked Anne, with all the air of a prim mother.

"Walking," said Lydia meekly.

"You'd better have come with us," said Anne. "It was very nice. Farvie
told me things."

"Yes," said Lydia, "I wish I had."

"Without your hat, too," pursued Anne anxiously. "I don't know whether
they do that here." Lydia remembered Reardon, and thought she knew.

They went to bed early, in a low state of mind. The colonel was tired,
and Anne, watching him from above as he toiled up the stairs, wondered
if he needed a little strychnia. She would remember, she thought, to
give it to him in the morning. After they had said good-night, and the
colonel, indeed, was in his bed, she heard the knocker clang and slipped
down the stairs to answer. Halfway she stopped, for Mary Nellen, candle
in hand, had arrived from the back regions, and was, with admirable
caution, opening the door a crack. But immediately she threw it wide,
and tossed her own reassurance over her shoulder, back to Anne.

"Mr. Alston Choate. To see your father."

So Anne came down the stairs, and Mr. Choate, hat in hand, apologised
for calling so late. He was extremely busy. He had to be at the office
over time, but he didn't want to-day's sun to go down and he not have
welcomed Mr. Blake. Anne had a chance, in the space of his delivering
this preamble, to think what a beautiful person he was. He had a young
face lighted by a twisted whimsical smile, and a capacious forehead,
built out a little into knobs of a noble sort, as if there were ample
chambers behind for the storing away of precedent. Altogether he would
have satisfied every aesthetic requirement: but he had a broken nose. The
portrait painter lusted for him, and then retired sorrowfully. But the
nose made him very human. Anne didn't know its eccentricity was the
result of breakage, but she saw it was quite unlike other noses and
found it superior to them.

Alston Choate spent every waking minute of his life in the practice of
law and the reading of novels; he was either digging into precedent,
expounding it, ragin