hat's crooked or wrong in this town? Little or big, he's
back of it all; straight back of it, or well back of it, hiding his face
and pulling the wires. He's to blame for it all, for he's made the town
what it is.

"He's got his hand on the neck of the town, and got hold of it tighter,
gradual, so nobody saw it and knocked it off; tighter and tighter,
squeezing the life out. He never made a gift to the town with one hand
that he didn't take it back with the other. What the town gets without
him giving it, he won't let it keep. The whole town's got his stamp on
it, grafting and lying and putting up a front. The whole town's afraid
of him. The Judge here, that's the best man in town, don't dare call his
soul his own. Me, I'm afraid of him, too, and the only reason I dare
stand up and say to his face what's said behind his back is because I've
got nothing to lose. It's him, there----"

"Don't, son," muttered the Judge tardily, unregarded, but Colonel
Everard listened courteously, with a faint, amused smile growing rather
stiff on his thin lips.

"Him, that's too good to speak to me or look at me, sitting there
grinning, and reading fine print, making out not to care, he's back of
it all--him, Everard."

The two men, who had heard him out, did not interrupt him now. It was
only a passionate jumble of boyish words they had listened to, but
behind it, vibrating in his tense voice, was something bigger than he
could frame words to express, something that commanded silence; pain
forcing its way into speech, long repression broken at last. The dignity
of it was about him still, though his brown eyes flashed no more
defiance, and he was only a shabby and hopeless boy walking uncertainly
to the office door, and fumbling with the handle.

"I'll go out this way," he said. "I've had enough of Theodore. And I've
had enough of this place. I'll say good morning, gentlemen."

In a prosaic and too often unsatisfactory world, which is not the stage,
no curtain drops to relieve you of the embarrassment of thinking what to
say next after a record speech; you have to step out of the limelight,
and walk somewhere else. Neil Donovan, emerging from the ancient
building which contained Judge Saxon's office into Post-office Square
after a brief interval of struggling successfully for self-control in a
dusty corridor little suited to such struggles, and not even ensuring
the privacy which is wrongly believed to be necessary for them, had one