en shut her eyes, and in an instant wherein they were closed she
lapsed into her favorite pose and disappeared behind her mask.

"Vurry kind of you, I'm shuah. Chahmed to have this little talk again."

He gazed at the empty face, saw the drugged eyes, and the smirking
mouth, and felt infinitely sad as a flash of her girlhood came back to
his memory. "Well, good-by, Mag," he said gently, and turned and went
down the steps.

The messenger boy whom Grant Adams passed as he went down the walk to
the street from the Van Dorn home, put a telegram into Mrs. Van Dorn's
lap. It was from Washington and read:

"Appointment as Federal Judge assured. Notify Sands. Have Calvin
prepare article for Monday's _Times_ and other papers."

She re-read it, held it in her hand for a time as she looked hungrily
into the future.

While Grant Adams and Margaret were talking, the two old men on the
porch, who once would have grappled with the problems of the great first
cause, dropped into cackling reminiscences of the old days of the
sixties and seventies when they were young men in their twenties and
Harvey was an unbleached yellow pine stain on the prairie grass. So they
forgot the flight of time, and forgot that indoors the music had
stopped, and that two young voices were cooing behind the curtains.
Upstairs, Laura Van Dorn and her mother, reading, tried with all their
might and main to be oblivious to the fact that the music had stopped,
and that certain suppressed laughs and gasps and long, silent gaps in
the irregular conversation meant rather too obvious love-making for an
affair which had not been formally recognized by the family. Yet the
formality was all that was lacking. For if ever an affair of the heart
was encouraged, was promoted, was greeted with everything but hurrahs
and hosannas by the family of the lady thereunto appertaining, it was
the love affair of Kenyon Adams and Lila Van Dorn.

The youth and the maiden below stairs were exceedingly happy. They went
through the elaborate business of love-making, from the first touch of
thrilling fingers to such passionately rapturous embraces as they might
steal half watched and half tolerated, and the mounting joy in their
hearts left no room for fear of the future. As they sat toying and
frivoling behind the curtains of the wide living room in the Nesbit
home, they saw Grant Adams's big, awkward figure hurrying across the
lawn. He walked with stooping shoulders and bo