enough she can love any man who will be
thoughtful and gentle, and whose habits of life are not hopelessly at war
with her own. But that kind of love doesn't breed love. Your vanity would
pique itself for a little while, and then you would know the curse of
unsought love and murder me in your heart a thousand times a day. No,
David, I have read you to little purpose if these are the things you will
ask of the woman who takes your name and becomes the mother of your
children." She had risen and was standing beside his chair, with her hand
lightly touching his shoulder. "Will you go now? There are others coming,
and--"

He made his adieux gravely and went away half dazed and a prey to many
emotions, but strangely light-hearted withal: and as once before, he
walked when he might have ridden. But the mixed-emotion mood was not
immortal. At the Clarendon he found a committee of Civic Leaguers waiting
to ask him if he would stand as a "Good Government" candidate in the
special election to fill the House vacancy in the capital district; and in
the discussion of ways and means, and the setting of political pins which
followed there was little food for sentiment.

It was three weeks and more after Governor Marston's call summoning the
Assembly for an investigative session. Kent had fought his way
triumphantly through the special election to a seat in the House, aided
and abetted manfully by Ormsby, Hildreth, and the entire Trans-Western
influence and vote. And now men were beginning to say that without the
tireless blows of the keen-witted, sharp-tongued young corporation lawyer,
the junto might still have reasserted itself.

But the House committee, of which Kent was the youngest member and the
chairman, had proved incorruptible, and the day of the Gaston wolf-pack
was over. Hendricks resigned, to escape a worse thing; Meigs came over to
the majority with a show of heartiness that made Kent doubly watchful of
him; heads fell to the right and left, until at the last there was left
only one member of the original cabal to reckon with; the judicial tool of
the capitol ring.

Kent had hesitated when MacFarlane's name came up; and the judge never
knew that he owed his escape from the inquisitorial House committee, and
his permission to resign on the plea of broken health, to a young woman
whom he had never seen.

It was Elinor Brentwood who was his intercessor; and the occasion was the
last day of the third week of the extra s