thought it--"to quiet her. If her affection were
captured, localized, centralized, she would not be clamoring to take a
man's place. She might be quite willing to enter politics, indirectly,
and be the power behind a man of power."

He looked again at the newspaper picture of Pearl Watson, and again at
his own reflection in the long glass.

"And a girl like this," Peter meditated, "would be a help, too. She is
evidently magnetic and convincing." His mind drifted pleasantly into
the purple hills and valleys of the future, and in a delightfully
vague way plans began to form for future campaigns, where a brilliant
young lawyer became at once the delight of his friends and the despair
of his enemies, by his scathing sarcasm, his quick repartee, and still
more by his piercing and inescapable logic. Never had the Conservative
banner been more proudly borne to victory. Older men wept tears of joy
as they listened and murmured, "The country is safe--thank God!"

Ably assisting him, though she deferred charmingly to him, in all
things, was his charming young wife, herself an able speaker and
debater who had once considered herself a suffragette, but who was now
entirely absorbed in her beautiful home and her brilliant husband.

Peter flicked the dust from his tan shoes with a polka-dotted
handkerchief, while rosy dreams, full of ambition and success filled
his impressionable mind.

Through the snowy hills the train made its way cautiously, making long
and apparently purposeless stops between stations, as if haunted by
the fear of arriving too early. At such times Peter had leisure to
carefully study the monotonous landscape, and he could not help but
notice that the disparity in the size of the barn and that of the
house in many cases was very great. A huge red barn, with white
trimmings, surmounted by windmills, often stood towering over a tiny
little weather-beaten, miserable house, which across a mile or two of
snow, looked about the size of a child's block.

But small houses can be made very cosy, thought Peter complacently,
for the glamor of adventure was on him, and no shade of sadness could
assail his high spirits.

Some of the women who came to the train were disappointing in
appearance. They were both shabby and sad, he thought, and he wondered
why but looking closely at them he thought, with the fallacy of youth,
that they must be very old.

Peter tried to outline his course of action. He would take a room
a