an to win Henstead with that? Oh, no; he meant to preach the Majesty
of the British Sovereign, King of coins, good tender from China to Peru.
She imagined him making some fine rhetoric out of it.

He breathed gently and regularly; for once he rested, he really rested
from his unresting efforts, from the cruel race he ran; he was for once
free from all the thoughts of his brain, all the devices of his
resourceful, unbaffled, unhesitating mind. With a sigh she turned away
and lowered the light, that in darkness he might sleep more easily. In
the darkness she stood a minute longer, seeing now only the dim outline
of his body on the bed; again the smile came, but her lips moved to
murmur softly, "Lead us not into temptation." And still murmuring the
only prayer that might serve him, still smiling that it was the only
prayer she could pray for her chosen husband, she left Quisante to his
rest.

CHAPTER X.

PRACTICAL POLITICS.

While Alexander Quisante increased in promise and prominence, Weston
Marchmont had begun to cause some anxiety to his best friends. His
passion for ultimates grew upon him; sometimes it seemed as though he
would put up with nothing less. At the same time a personal fastidiousness
and a social exclusiveness, always to a certain extent characteristic of
the man, gathered greater dominion over him. He was not civil to the
people towards whom civility would be useful, and he refused to shut
his eyes to the logical defects or moral shortcomings in the measures
promoted by his party. His abilities were still conceded in ample terms,
his charm still handsomely and sincerely acknowledged. But a suspicion
gradually got about that he was impracticable, that he had a perverse
affection for unpopular causes, for reasons of approval or disapproval
that did not occur to the world at large, for having a private point of
view of his own, differentiated from the common view by distinctions as
unyielding as to the ordinary eye they were minute. The man who begins
merely by being uncompromising as to his own convictions may end in
finding an actual pleasure in disagreeing with those of others. Some
such development was, according to acute observers, taking place in
Marchmont; if the tendency became his master, farewell to the high
career to which he had appeared to be destined. Plain men would call him
finicking, and practical men would think it impossible