sted.

"No; and it's the worse for us in some respects. You will not find your
ideal politician until you find a man with somewhat of the old knightly
spirit in him. And I'll go further and say that when you do find him he
will be at heart the champion of the woman he loves rather than that of a
political constituency."

She became silent at that, and for a time the low sweet harmonies of the
nocturne Penelope was playing filled the gap.

Kent left his chair and began to wish honestly for Ormsby's return. He was
searing the wound again, and the process was more than commonly painful.
They had been speaking in figures, as a man and a woman will; yet he made
sure the mask of metaphor was transparent, no less to her than to him. As
many times before, his heart was crying out to her; but now behind the cry
there was an upsurging tidal wave of emotion new and strange; a toppling
down of barriers and a sweeping inrush of passionate rebellion.

Why had she put it out of her power to make him her champion in the Field
of the Lust of Mastery? Instantly, and like a revealing lightning flash,
it dawned upon him that this was his awakening. Something of himself she
had shown him in the former time: how he was rusting inactive in the small
field when he should be doing a man's work, the work for which his
training had fitted him, in the larger. But the glamour of sentiment had
been over it all in those days, and to the passion-warped the high call is
transmitted in terms of self-seeking.

He turned upon her suddenly.

"Did you mean to reproach me?" he asked abruptly.

"How absurd!"

"No, it isn't. You are responsible for me, in a certain sense. You sent me
out into the world, and somehow I feel as if I had disappointed you."

"'But what went ye out for to see?'" she quoted softly.

"I know," he nodded, sitting down again. "You thought you were arousing a
worthy ambition, but it was only avarice that was quickened. I've been
trying to be a money-getter."

"You can be something vastly better."

"No, I am afraid not; it is too late."

Again the piano-mellowed silence supervened, and Kent put his elbows on
his knees and his face in his hands, being very miserable. He believed now
what he had been slow to credit before: that he had it in him to hew his
way to the end of the line if only the motive were strong enough to call
out all the reserves of battle-might and courage. That motive she alone,
of all the women in the wor