wered Lanley; "but I have sense enough to be ashamed of doing
so. You're proud of being proud of your old Signer."

"As a matter of fact," Mr. Wilsey remarked slowly, "Josiah Wilsey did not
sign the Declaration."

"What!" cried Lanley. "You've always told me he did."

Wilsey shook his head gently, as one who went about correcting errors.

"No. What I said was that I feel no moral doubt he would have signed it
if an attack of illness--"

Lanley gave a short roar.

"That's just like _you_, Wilsey. You wouldn't have signed it, either. You
would have said that while in cordial sympathy with the ideas set forth,
you would not care to put your name to a document that might give pain to
a monarch who, though not as liberal as some of us could wish, was yet--"

"As a matter of fact," Wilsey began again even more coldly, "I should
have signed--"

"Oh, you think so now. A hundred years from now you'd sign a petition for
the eight-hour law."

"Never!" said Wilsey, raising his hand. "I should never put my name to a
document--" He stopped at another roar from his friend, and never took
the sentence up again, but indicated with a gesture that only legal minds
were worth arguing with on points of this sort.

When he had gone, Lanley dipped the spoon in his oyster stew with not a
little pleasure. Nothing, apparently, could have raised his spirits more
than the knowledge that old Josiah Wilsey had not signed the Declaration.
He actually chuckled a little. "So like Wilsey himself," he thought. "No
moral courage; calls it conservatism." Then his joy abated. Just so, he
thought, must he himself appear to Mrs. Wayne. Yet his self-respect
insisted that his case was different. Loyalty had been responsible not
for his conservatism, but for the pig-headedness with which he had acted
upon it. He would have asked nothing better than to profess himself
open-minded to Mrs. Wayne's views, only he could not desert Adelaide in
the moment of her struggle for beliefs in which he himself had brought
her up. And now she had deserted him. He alone was left to flaunt a
banner the motto of which he didn't wholly believe, while Adelaide, at a
word from Vincent, had gone over to the other side. And no one knew what
his loyalty had cost him. Long ago, in his first year at college, he had
flunked the examination of the professor whom he reverenced above all
others. No one had cared, no one had long remembered, except Lanley
himself, and he had remembe