g shores.

Alison, with absorbed fascination, watched the people; encountered, here
and there, recognitions from men and women with whom she had once danced
and dined in what now seemed a previous existence. Why had they come?
and how had they received the message? She ran into a little man, a
dealer in artists' supplies who once had sold her paints and brushes, who
stared and bowed uncertainly. She surprised him by taking his hand.

"Did you like it?" she asked, impulsively.

"It's what I've been thinking for years, Miss Parr," he responded,
"thinking and feeling. But I never knew it was Christianity. And I
never thought--" he stopped and looked at her, alarmed.

"Oh," she said, "I believe in it, too--or try to."

She left him, mentally gasping . . . . Without, on the sidewalk,
Eleanor Goodrich was engaged in conversation with a stockily built man,
inclined to stoutness; he had a brown face and a clipped, bristly
mustache. Alison paused involuntarily, and saw him start and hesitate
as his clear, direct gaze met her own.

Bedloe Hubbell was one of those who had once sought to marry her. She
recalled him as an amiable and aimless boy; and after she had gone East
she had received with incredulity and then with amusement the news of his
venture into altruistic politics. It was his efficiency she had doubted,
not his sincerity. Later tidings, contemptuous and eventually irritable
utterances of her own father, together with accounts in the New York
newspapers of his campaign, had convinced her in spite of herself that
Bedloe Hubbell had actually shaken the seats of power. And somehow, as
she now took him in, he looked it.

His transformation was one of the signs, one of the mysteries of the
times. The ridicule and abuse of the press, the opposition and enmity of
his childhood friends, had developed the man of force she now beheld, and
who came forward to greet her.

"Alison!" he exclaimed. He had changed in one sense, and not in another.
Her colour deepened as the sound of his voice brought back the lapsed
memories of the old intimacy. For she had been kind to him, kinder than
to any other; and the news of his marriage--to a woman from the Pacific
coast--had actually induced in her certain longings and regrets. When
the cards had reached her, New York and the excitement of the life into
which she had been weakly, if somewhat unwittingly, drawn had already
begun to pall.

"I'm so glad to see you," she told him. "I'v