down."

She took him seriously.

"You don't need it. Miss Van Brock has a very lovely home of her own," she
said soberly.

It was at his tongue's end to tell the woman he loved how the woman he did
not love had refused him, but he saved himself on the brink and said:

"Why Miss Van Brock?"

"Because she is vindictive, too, and----"

"But I am not vindictive."

"Yes, you are. Do you know anything about Judge MacFarlane's family
affairs?"

"A little. He has three daughters; one of them rather unhappily married, I
believe."

"Have you considered the cost to these three women if you make their
father's name a byword in the city where they were born?"

"He should have considered it," was the unmoved reply.

"David!" she said; and he looked up quickly.

"You want me to let him resign? It would be compounding a felony. He is a
Judge, and he was bribed."

She sat down beside him in the cushioned window seat and began to plead
with him.

"You must let him go," she insisted. "It is entirely in your hands as
chairman of the House committee; the governor, himself, told me so. I know
all you say about him is true; but he is old and wretched, with only a
little while to live, at best."

There was a curious little smile curling his lip when he answered her.

"He has chosen a good advocate. It is quite like a man of his stamp to try
to reach me through you."

"David!" she said again. Then: "I really shouldn't know him if I were to
see him."

"Then why----" he began; but there was a love-light in the blue-gray eyes
to set his heart afire. "You are doing this for me?" he said, trembling on
the verge of things unutterable.

"Yes. You don't know how it hurts me to see you growing hard and merciless
as you climb higher and higher in the path you have marked out for
yourself."

"The path you have marked out for me," he corrected. "Do you remember our
little talk over the embers of the fire in your sitting-room at home? I
knew then that I had lost the love I might have won; but the desire to be
the kind of leader you were describing was born in me at that moment. I
haven't always been true to the ideal. I couldn't be, lacking the right to
wear your colors on my heart----"

"Don't!" she said. "I haven't been true to my ideals. I--I sold them,
David!"

She was in his arms when she said it, and the bachelor maid was quite lost
in the woman.

"I'll never believe that," he said loyally. "But if you did, we'll buy