about the Laird-Masters story?"

"Made up out of whole cloth," responded Enderby.

"Who made it up?"

Comprehension and pity were in his intonation as he replied: "Not
Banneker, I understand. It was passed on to him."

"Then you don't think him to blame?" she cried eagerly.

"I can't exculpate him as readily as that. Such a story, considering its
inevitable--I may say its intended--consequences, should never have been
published without the fullest investigation."

"Suppose"--she hesitated--"he had it on what he considered good
authority?"

"He has never even cited his authority."

"Couldn't it have been confidential?" she pleaded.

"Io, do you know his authority? Has he told you?"

"No."

Enderby's voice was very gentle as he put his next question. "Do you
trust Banneker, my dear?"

She met his regard, unflinchingly, but there was a piteous quiver about
the lips which formed the answer. "I have trusted him. Absolutely."

"Ah; well! I've seen too much good and bad too inextricably mingled in
human nature, to judge on part information."

Election day came and passed. On the evening of it the streets were
ribald with crowds gleefully shrieking! "Call me Dennis, wifie. I'm
stung!" Laird had been badly beaten, running far behind Marrineal.
Halloran, the ring candidate, was elected. Banneker did it.

As he looked back on the incidents of the campaign and its culminating
event with a sense of self-doubt poisoning his triumph, that which most
sickened him of his own course was not the overt insult from the
financial emperor, but the soft-palmed gratulation of Horace Vanney.

CHAPTER XIV

Ambition is the most conservative of influences upon a radical mind. No
sooner had Tertius Marrineal formulated his political hopes than there
were manifested in the conduct of The Patriot strange symptoms of a
hankering after respectability. Essentially Marrineal was not
respectable, any more than he was radical. He was simply and singly
selfish. But, having mapped out for himself a career which did not stop
short of a stately and deep-porticoed edifice in Washington's
Pennsylvania Avenue (for his conception of the potential leverage of a
great newspaper increased with The Patriot's circulation), he deemed it
advisable to moderate some of the more blatant features, on the same
principle which had induced him to reform the Veridian lumber mill
abuses, lest they be brought up to his political detriment later. A
lon