weariness so profound that it is tragic. It was he who was more
interested in the thoughts,--the passion, the protest, the defiance, and
the dread,--which the sight of that face set to boiling within me.
Sometimes he smiled cynically at the turmoil, and at other times he
watched it with what seemed to me bitter disgust and disappointment and
regret.

While this tempest was struggling to boil over into action, Carlotta
appeared. She had never stayed long at Washington after the first
winter; she preferred, for the children and perhaps for herself, the
quiet and the greater simplicity of Fredonia. But--"I got to thinking
about it," said she, "and it seemed to me a bad idea for a man to be
separated so long from his wife and children--and home influences."

That last phrase was accompanied by one of her queer shrewd looks.

"Your idea is not without merit," replied I judicially.

"What are you smiling at?" she demanded sharply.

"If it was a smile," said I, "it was at myself."

"No, you were laughing at me. You think I am jealous."

"Of what? Of whom?"

She looked fixedly at me and finally said: "I want to tell you two
things about myself and you. The first is that I am afraid of you."

"Why?" said I.

"I don't know," she answered.

"And the second confession?"

"That I never trust you."

"Why?"

"I don't know."

"Yet you are always telling me I am cold."

She laughed shortly. "So is a stick of dynamite," said she.

She stayed on at Washington.

XI

BURBANK

It was through Carlotta that I came to know Burbank well.

He was in the House, representing the easternmost district of our state.
I had disliked him when we were boys in the state assembly together,
and, when I met him again in Washington, he seemed to me to have all his
faults of fifteen years before aggravated by persistence in them.
Finally, I needed his place in Congress for a useful lieutenant of
Woodruff's and ordered him beaten for the renomination. He made a bitter
fight against decapitation, and, as he was popular with the people of
his district, we had some difficulty in defeating him. But when he was
beaten, he was of course helpless and hopelessly discredited,--the
people soon forget a fallen politician. He "took off his coat" and
worked hard and well for the election of the man who had euchred him out
of the nomination. When he returned to Washington to finish his term,
he began a double, desperate assault upon my fri