beyond the natural one of her seemingly unprovoked
desertion of you? Has not my wife--" the nobility with which he
emphasized those two words made my heart swell--"spoken the truth?"

Ah! then the mask of disdainful serenity with which the other had
hitherto veiled the burning anguish of his soul fell in one burst of
irresistible passion.

"True! yes, it is true. But what does that truth involve for me? Not
two weeks, but seven years of torture, five of them devoted to grief for
her, loss, and two to rage and bitter revulsion against her whole
sex when I found her alive, and myself the despised victim of her
deception."

"She wronged you--she acknowledges that--but it was the wrong of an
unthinking child--not of a realizing woman. Would you, a realizing man,
tear her now from home, from her child, from her place in the community
and my heart--make her despicable as well as unhappy, just to feed your
revenge?"

"Yes, I would do that."

"Jeopardize interests you have so often professed in my hearing to be
far above personal consideration--the success of your party, the triumph
of your political principles?"

"My political principles!" Oh, the irony of his voice, the triumph
in his laugh! "And what do you know of them? What I have said. Mayor
Packard, your education as a politician has yet to be completed before
you will be fit for the governorship of a state. I am an adept at
the glorification of the party, of the man that it suits my present
exigencies to promote, but it is a faculty which should have made you
pause before you trusted me with the furtherance and final success of a
campaign which may outlast those exigencies. I have not always been of
your party; I am not so now at heart."

The mayor, outraged in every sentiment of honor as well as in the most
cherished feelings of his heart, lowered upon his unmoved secretary with
a wrath which would have borne down any other man before it.

"Do you mean to say, you, that your work is a traitor's work? That the
glorification you speak of is false? That you may talk in my favor, but
that when you come to the issue, you will vote according to your heart;
that is, for Stanton?"

"I have succeeded in making myself intelligible."

The mayor flushed; indignation gave him vehemence.

"Then," he cried, "I take back the word by which I qualified you a
moment ago. You are not a villain, you are a dastard."

Mr. Steele bowed in a way which turned the opprobrium into