he replied simply.

It was one of the oddities of his temperament that at this moment he
saw himself objectively. What a subdued neutral tinted thing was life!
By all the canons of romance it was now his cue for perfervid speech.

"What then?" he asked quietly.

"Liking--a real liking."

"Will it grow warmer?"

"I cannot tell."

"I will teach you to love me," he declared, his artistic self nudging
him meanwhile that he had dropped into the worn formula of the ages.

Ruth did not deny him the attempt, and he undertook a lesson on the
spot, pointing out that they saw life through similar eyes; that art,
music, literature spoke with a common voice; that if true marriage were
perfect companionship, the auguries were not uncertain in their happy
omen; so on till he wearied her with argument.

"All those things refine love," she put in at last, a little wistfully;
"they are not its essence. A man may be a barbarian and yet lovable."

He desisted at that, and presently went away. Out of doors her words
clothed themselves with a personal application. Shelby--lovable
barbarian!--was entering the gate.

Of what immediately followed neither man retained a clear recollection.
It was a clash of temperaments hopelessly at odds, in which the spoken
word weighed little beside the mute antipathy jaundicing the mind. Yet
the word played no small part in the sequel. Graves assured Shelby
that he should spare no effort to compass his defeat; while Shelby in
his turn suggested that the zest of the campaign would be doubled if
Graves were only his ridiculous opponent.

Puzzling how the quarrel could have begun and hurried to its climax so
swiftly, Bernard Graves swung up the street heedless of his steps.
Then the bland colonial facade of the public library confronted him
like a smirking face and, as his vagrant fancy trifled with the
conceit, its lips opened to emit two chattering girls.

"I was the tenth on the waiting-list," said one.

He saw that she spoke of his own volume which she held in a triumphant
embrace with a box of caramels, and was filled with a nauseated disgust
for his handiwork. Retracing his steps he climbed to the _Whig_
office, and finding Sprague at his desk, he swept a pile of exchanges
from a chair and drew it to the editor's elbow.

"Volney," he asked, "does this talk of an independent movement against
Ross Shelby amount to anything?"

Sprague's eye lit.

"It's gathering headway every minut