d ever turned. But his past and the insistent
present seemed to hamper every forward step. It was an open secret
that the disciplining of the man he hoped to succeed had issued
directly from his refusal to stand with his colleagues in this
question, and Shelby in his heart approved his course. He did not
anticipate that he should meet a like dilemma; the winter session of
the old House would doubtless settle the matter, as Krantz had said;
but Volney Sprague had harped upon his possible action so incessantly
that he could easily see why the organization might wonder at his
silence. Was the time for speech, then, so near as this creature
warned?

Yet he took a certain comfort in Krantz's companionship in the morning,
as from the crowded ferry he watched the city's sky line detach itself
from the mist. Notwithstanding his legislative career, New York was
almost an unknown country, and this battlemented mystery overawed him
like a frowning bastion. It challenged the alien to do and dare, but
it quenched his individuality. Krantz, obviously, was hardened to its
lesson. He elbowed the jostling pack in the ferry slip as one of them,
called the elevated road the "L," and was otherwise enviably
sophisticated. Shelby imitated at a distance, but the hall mark of the
outsider was too deep for ready erasure. He would persistently
apologize to people with whom he collided, and surrender his car seat
to standing women.

He had mentioned a Madison Square hotel as his destination, and on
Krantz's saying that he meant to stop there briefly, too, it fell out
that they approached the room clerk together, and that Krantz
registered for both. So it chanced that, unknown to himself, the
candidate was entered with a fine flourish as the Hon. Calvin Ross
Shelby. The two men breakfasted together, and Krantz presently went
about his business, leaving Shelby in some quandary how he should
employ the interval before the hour appointed by the great leader for
their meeting. For a time he loitered in a window overlooking the
restful oasis of the square, a place of fountains and pleasant leafage,
dominated by a graceful tower which served as footstool for a shining
goddess on tiptoe to greet the morning. His eyes were not long bent
upon the goddess,--he did not "live with the gods,"--nor yet upon the
greenness, since he had lived all his days with shrubs and trees; he
watched the commingling ride of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, watched