she was less afraid than of any
other living creature; that was all. Thinking, as he stood with Paul
Blecker, leaning over the gate, of how she had brought him a badly-made
havelock that morning. "You're always so kind to me," she said. "So I
am kind to her," he thought, his quiet blue eyes growing duller behind
their spectacles; "so I will be."

The Doctor opened the gate, and went in, turning into the shrubbery, and
seating himself under a sycamore.

"Don't wait for me, McKinstry," he said. "I'll sit here and smoke a bit.
Here comes the aforesaid Joseph."

He did not light his cigar, however, when the other left him; took off
his hat to let the wind blow through his hair, the petulant heat dying
out of his face, giving place to a rigid settling, at last, of the
fickle features.

A flabby, red-faced man in fine broadcloth and jaunty beaver came down
the path, fumbling his seals, and met the Captain with a puffing snort
of salutation. To Blecker, whose fancy was made sultry to-night by some
passion we know nothing of, he looked like a bloated spider coming out
of the cell where his victims were. "Gorging himself, while they and the
country suffer the loss," he muttered. But Paul was a hot-brained
young man. We should only have seen a vulgar, commonplace trickster in
politics, such as the people make pets of. "Such men as Schuyler Gurney
get the fattest offices. God send us a monarchy soon!" he hissed under
his breath, as the gate closed after the politician. By which you will
perceive that Dr. Blecker, like most men fighting their way up, was too
near-sighted for any abstract theories. Liberty, he thought, was a very
poetic, Millennium-like idea for stump-speeches and college-cubs, but he
grappled with the time the States were too chaotic, untaught a mass for
self-government; he cursed secession as anarchy, and the government at
Washington for those equally anarchical, drunken whims of tyranny; he
would like to see an iron heel put on the whole concern, for wholesome
discipline. The Doctor was born in one of the Border States; men there,
it is said, have a sort of hand-to-mouth politics; their daily bread of
rights is all they care for; so Paul seldom looked into to-morrow for
anything. In other ways, too, his birth had curdled his blood into a
sensuous languor. To-night, after McKinstry had entered the house, and
he was left alone, the quaint old garden quiet, the air about him clean,
pure, unperfumed, the stars di