rk?" said Elinor. "Isn't there work to do here?"

"I am not a house-worker. I came to help Mr. Doyle. To-day I shall make
speeches."

Elinor was playing the game carefully. "But--can you make speeches?" she
asked.

"Me? That is my work, here, in Russia, everywhere. In Russia it is the
women who speak, the men who do what the women tell them to do. Here
some day it will be the same."

Always afterwards Elinor remembered the five minutes that followed, for
Olga, standing before her, suddenly burst into impassioned oratory.
She cited the wrongs of the poor under the old regime. She painted in
glowing colors the new. She was excited, hectic, powerful. Elinor in
her chair, an aristocrat to the finger-tips, was frightened, interested,
thrilled.

Long after Olga had gone she sat there, wondering at the real
conviction, the intensity of passion, of hate and of revenge that
actuated this newest tool of Doyle's. Doyle and his associates might be
actuated by self-interest, but the real danger in the movement lay not
with the Doyles of the world, but with these fanatic liberators. They
preached to the poor a new religion, not of creed or of Church, but
of freedom. Freedom without laws of God or of man, freedom of love, of
lust, of time, of all responsibility. And the poor, weighted with laws
and cares, longed to throw off their burdens.

Perhaps it was not the doctrine itself that was wrong. It was its
imposition by force on a world not yet ready for it that was wrong;
its imposition by violence. It might come, but not this way. Not, God
preventing, this way.

There was a polling place across the street, in the basement of a school
house. The vote was heavy and all day men lounged on the pavements,
smoking and talking. Once she saw Olga in the crowd, and later on Louis
Akers drove up in an open automobile, handsome, apparently confident,
and greeted with cheers. But Elinor, knowing him well, gained nothing
from his face.

Late that night she heard Doyle come in and move about the lower floor.
She knew every emphasis of his walk, and when in the room underneath she
heard him settle down to steady, deliberate pacing, she knew that he was
facing some new situation, and, after his custom, thinking it out alone.

At midnight he came up the stairs and unlocked her door. He entered,
closing the door behind him, and stood looking at her. His face was so
strange that she wondered if he had decided to do away with her.

"To-morr