pipe, then drawing up his chair opposite, he
sat down to listen. No premonition came to him at that moment that the
story his visitor had to tell in any way concerned himself, or would
deepen the even melancholy of his present days. He settled himself
comfortably, with a sense of justifiable relaxation from toil. The
troubles of another might arouse his intellectual sympathy, but they
could add no burden to his heart. He even experienced a pleasurable
curiosity. Emmet was to some degree a mysterious character to him,
though he no longer thought of him in connection with Felicity. Her
departure from Warwick had put an end to that suspicion, and made it
something of which he was ashamed. He divined indeed that the trouble
concerned a woman, but not the woman who had gone away with such
evident indifference to any man in Warwick.

"Well, Emmet," he said at last, "here I am, all ears. Perhaps it will
help you to a beginning if I suggest that there's a woman somewhere at
the bottom of the trouble."

The other placed his chair snugly in the corner, buried his hands deep
in his pockets, and looked at the brasier with a fixed stare. "It's
not one woman," he began, with a sensible effort, "it's two. I don't
know any better way to give you an idea of the tangle I've gotten
myself into than by going back to the beginning of the story. About
five years ago, I hadn't any more idea of going into politics than you
have now. I was playing baseball in the summer and running a car in
winter, and saving my money. My parents were both dead, and I was
thinking that it was pretty near time for me to get married. I was
never one to throw away my money with the boys,--it came too hard,--I
didn't even smoke or drink, and"--

"That's a bad beginning," Leigh interrupted, shaking his head with mock
seriousness. "No small vices--women."

Emmet took the comment with good humour. "No, I was n't an easy mark
for women, either. I tell you my main idea was to get ahead, to save
some money. I could n't stand poverty; I had seen too much of it.
When I was a boy, I carried the washing for my mother after school
hours. In summer I played baseball and hung around the race-track. If
I had n't been so heavy, I 'd have become a jockey and made my fortune
quicker; but anyhow I had ten thousand dollars salted away by the time
I was twenty-five. I 'm thirty now."

Leigh was secretly somewhat amused by this prologue, which seemed to
spri