tion called for Illinois'
vote, it was cast solidly for Scarborough.

There was straightway pandemonium. It was half an hour before any one
could get a hearing. Then Indiana was called, and Pierson, attorney
general of that state and chairman of its delegation, cast its vote as
in the other ballots, for Hitchens, its governor. From my box I was
watching Scarborough and his immediate friends going from delegation to
delegation, and I knew what he was about. When Iowa was called and cast
its vote solidly for him I knew he had failed.

"How white he is!" said Mrs. Sandys, who was looking at him through
opera-glasses.

I borrowed them and saw that his gaze was fixed on a box on the other
side of the huge auditorium, on a woman in that box--I had only to look
at her to see which woman. She was beautiful, of that type of charm
which the French sum up in the phrase "the woman of thirty." I have
heard crowds bellow too often to be moved by it--though the twenty or
thirty thousand gathered under that roof were outdoing the cannonade of
any thunderstorm. But that woman's look in response to
Scarborough's--there was sympathy and understanding in it, and more,
infinitely more. He had been crushed for the moment--and I understood
enough of his situation to understand what a blow to all his plans this
untimely apparent triumph was. She was showing that she too felt the
blow, but she was also sending a message of courage to him--one of those
messages that transcend words, like music, like the perfumes of flowers
and fields, like that which fills us as we look straight up into a clear
night sky. I lowered the glasses and looked away--I could not bear it.
For the moment I hated him--hating myself for it.

I heard Carlotta asking a woman in the box next ours the name of "the
woman with the white plume in the big black hat in the seventh box on
the other side."

"Mrs. Scarborough," was the answer.

"Oh, is that _she_?" exclaimed Mrs. Sandys, almost snatching her glasses
from me in her eagerness. "You know who she was--John Dumont's
widow--you remember him? She must be an unusual person to have attracted
two such men."

But Scarborough was nominated now. He waved aside those who tried to
take him up and bear him to the platform. He walked down the aisle alone
and ascended amid a tense silence; he stood looking calmly out. His face
had lost its whiteness of a few minutes before. As he stood there, big
and still, a sort of embodimen