The old schoolmaster shook his head as one who knows, and tried to push
the thin gray hairs out of his eyes in a groping way. Margaret lifted
them back so quietly that he did not feel her.

"You'll call the Republic a sham next!" said the Doctor, coolly
aggravating.

"The Republic!" The old man quickened his tone, like a war-horse
scenting the battle near at hand. "There never was a thinner-crusted
Devil's egg in the world than democracy. I think I've told you that
before?"

"I think you have," said the other, dryly.

"You always were a Tory, Mr. Howth," said his wife, in her placid,
creamy way. "It is in the blood, I think, Doctor. The Howths fought
under Cornwallis, you know."

The schoolmaster waited until his wife had ended.

"Very true, Mrs. Howth," he said, with a grave smile. Then his thin face
grew hot again.

"No, Dr. Knowles. Your scheme is but a sign of the mad age we live
in. Since the thirteenth century, when the anarchic element sprang
full-grown into the history of humanity, that history has been chaos.
And this republic is the culmination of chaos."

"Out of chaos came the new-born earth," suggested the Doctor.

"But its foundations were granite," rejoined the old man with nervous
eagerness,--"granite, not the slime of yesterday. When you found
empires, go to work as God worked."

The Doctor did not answer; sat looking, instead, out into the dark
indifferently, as if the heresies which the old man hurled at him were
some old worn-out song. Seeing, however, that the schoolmaster's flush
of enthusiasm seemed on the point of dying out, he roused himself to
gibe it into life.

"Well, Mr. Howth, what will you have? If the trodden rights of the human
soul are the slime of yesterday, how shall we found our empire to last?
On despotism? Civil or theocratic?"

"Any despotism is better than that of newly enfranchised serfs," replied
the schoolmaster.

The Doctor laughed.

"What a successful politician you would have made! You would have had
such a winning way to the hearts of the great unwashed!"

Mrs. Howth laid down her knitting.

"My dear," she said, timidly, "I think that is treason."

The angry heat died out of his face instantly, as he turned to her,
without the glimmer of a covert smile at her simplicity. She was a
woman; and when he spoke to the Doctor, it was in a tone less sharp.

"What is it the boys used to declaim, their Yankee hearts throbbing
under their roundabouts? 'Happy,