ay the end of his
cigarette. "And so much the worse for you. Good-night, lady."

And away he strode into the darkness, leaving her amused, yet with a
peculiar sense of her own insignificance.

Charlton was back again early the next morning and spent that day--and
a large part of many days there-after--in working at the wreck, Martin
Hastings, inspecting known weak spots, searching for unknown ones,
patching here and there, trying all the schemes teeming in his
ingenious and supremely sensible mind in the hope of setting the wreck
afloat again. He could not comprehend why the old man remained alive.
He had seen many a human being go who was in health, in comparison with
this conglomerate of diseases and frailties; yet life there was, and a
most tenacious life. He worked and watched, and from day to day put
off suggesting that they telegraph for the son. The coming of his son
might shake Martin's conviction that he would get well; it seemed to
Charlton that that conviction was the one thread holding his patient
from the abyss where darkness and silence reign supreme.

Jane could not leave the grounds. If she had she would have seen
Victor Dorn either not at all or at a distance. For the campaign was
now approaching its climax.

The public man is always two wholly different personalities. There is
the man the public sees--and fancies it knows. There is the man known
only to his intimates, known imperfectly to them, perhaps an unknown
quantity even to himself until the necessity for decisive action
reveals him to himself and to those in a position to see what he really
did. Unfortunately, it is not the man the public sees but the hidden
man who is elected to the office. Nothing could be falser than the old
saw that sooner or later a man stands revealed. Sometimes, as we well
know, history has not found out a man after a thousand years of
studying him. And the most familiar, the most constantly observed men
in public life often round out a long career without ever having
aroused in the public more than a faint and formless suspicion as to
the truth about them.

The chief reason for this is that, in studying a character, no one is
content with the plain and easy way of reaching an understanding of
it--the way of looking only at its ACTS. We all love to dabble in the
metaphysical, to examine and weigh motives and intentions, to compare
ourselves and make wildly erroneous judgment inevitable by listening to
th