"I hoped so: if you have too little, I have a good bit too much. But that corners it in a way to make me sorry. I am not keeping my promise to win what you weren't able to give me at first."

"Please don't put it that way. If there be any fault, it is mine. You have left nothing undone."

The man of expedients ran over his cards reflectively and decided that the moment for playing his long suit was fully come.

"Your goodness of heart excuses me where I am to blame," he qualified. "I am coming to believe that I have defeated my own cause."

"By being too good to me?" she suggested.

"No; by running where I should have been content to walk; by shackling you with a promise, and so in a certain sense becoming your jailer. That is putting it rather clumsily, but isn't it true?"

"I had never thought of it in that light," she said unresponsively.

"You wouldn't, naturally. But the fact remains. It has wrenched your point of view hopelessly aside, don't you think? I have seen it and felt it all along, but I haven't had the courage of my convictions."

"In what way?" she asked.

"In the only way the thing can be stood squarely upon its feet. It's hard--desperately hard; and hardest of all for a man of my peculiar build.

I am no longer what you would call a young man, Elinor, and I have never learned to turn back and begin all over again with any show of heartiness.

They used to say of me in the Yacht Club that if I gained a half-length in a race, I'd hold it if it took the sticks out of my boat."

"I know," she a.s.sented absently.

"Well, it's the same way now. But for your sake--or rather for the sake of my love--I am going to turn back for once. You are free again, Elinor. All I ask is that you will let me begin where I left off somewhere on the road between here and Boston last fall."

She sat with clasped hands looking steadily at the darkened windows of the opposite house, and he let her take her own time. When she spoke there was a thrill in her voice that he had never heard before.

"I don't deserve it--so much consideration, I mean," she said; and he made haste to spare her.

"Yes, you do; you deserve anything the best man in the world could do for you, and I'm a good bit short of that."

"But if I don't want you to go back?"

He had gained something--much more than he knew; and for a tremulous instant he was near to losing it again by a pa.s.sionate retraction of all he had been saying. But the cool purpose came to his rescue in time.

"I should still insist on doing it. You gave me what you could, but I want more, and I am willing to do what is necessary to win it."

Again she said: "You are too good to me," and again he contradicted her.

"No; it is hardly a question of goodness; indeed, I am not sure that it escapes being selfish. But I am very much in earnest, and I am going to prove it. Three years ago you met a man whom you thought you could love--don't interrupt me, please. He was like some other men we know: he didn't have the courage of his convictions, lacking the few dollars which might have made things more nearly equal. May I go on?"

"I suppose you have earned the right to say what you please," was the impa.s.sive reply.

It was the old struggle in which they were so evenly matched--of the woman to preserve her poise; of the man to break it down. Another lover might have given up in despair, but Ormsby's strength lay in holding on in the face of all discouragements.

"I believe, as much as I believe anything in this world, that you were mistaken in regard to your feeling for the other man," he went on calmly.

"But I want you to be sure of that for yourself, and you can't be sure unless you are free to choose between us."

"Oh, don't!--you shouldn't say such things to me," she broke out; and then he knew he was gaining ground.

"Yes, I must. We have been stumbling around in the dark all these months, and I mean to be the lantern-bearer for once in a way. You know, and I know, and Kent is coming to know. That man is going to be a success, Elinor: he has it in him, and he sha'n't lack the money-backing he may need. When he arrives----"

She turned on him quickly, and the blue-gray eyes were suspiciously bright.

"Please don't bury me alive," she begged.

He saw what he had done; that the nicely calculated purpose had carried straight and true to its mark; and for a moment the mixed motives, which are at the bottom of most human sayings and doings, surged in him like the sea at the vexed tide-line of an iron-bound coast. But it was the better Brookes Ormsby that struggled up out of the elemental conflict.

"Don't mistake me," he said. "I am neither better nor worse than other men, I fancy. My motives, such as they are, would probably turn out to be purely selfish in the last a.n.a.lysis. I am proceeding on the theory that constraint breeds the desire for the thing it forbids; therefore I remove it. Also, it is a part of that theory that the successful David Kent will not appeal to you as the unspoiled country lawyer did. No, I'm not going to spoil him; if I were, I shouldn't be telling you about it. But--may I be brutally frank?--the David Kent who will come successfully out of this political prize-fight will not be the man you have idealized."

There was a muttering of thunder in the air, and the cool precursory breeze of a shower was sweeping through the tree-tops.

"Shall we go into the house?" she asked; and he took it as his dismissal.

"You may; I have kept you up long enough." And then, taking her hand: "Are we safely ash.o.r.e on the new continent, Elinor? May I come and go as heretofore?"

"You were always welcome, Brookes; you will be twice welcome, now."

It was the first time she had ever called him by his Christian name and it went near to toppling down the carefully reared structure of self-restraint. But he made shift to sh.o.r.e the tottering walls with a playful retort.

"If that is the case, I'll have to think up some more self-abnegations.

Good night."

XX

THE WINNING LOSER

Editor Hildreth's prophecy concerning the probable att.i.tude of the administration newspapers in the discussion of the oil field affair waited but a day for its fulfilment. On the Friday morning there appeared in the _Capital Tribune_, the _Midland City Chronicle_, the _Range County Maverick_ and the _Agriculta Ruralist_ able editorials exonerating the People's Party, its policy and the executive, and heaping mountains of obloquy on the name of Duvall. These editorials were so similar in tone, tenor and texture, as pointedly to suggest a common model--a coincidence which was not allowed to pa.s.s unremarked by Hildreth and other molders of public opinion on the opposite side of the political fence.

But Hildreth did not pause at generalities. Two days after the Universal's triumph in the Belmount field, the _Argus_ began to "hit it up" boldly toward the capitol, and two things came of it. The first was an attempt by some party or parties unknown to buy up a controlling interest in the _Argus_. The second was the waylaying of David Kent in the lobby of the Clarendon Hotel by no less a personage than the Honorable Melton Meigs, attorney-general of the State.

In his first conversation with Ormsby, Kent had spoken of the three leading spirits of the junto as from personal knowledge; but of the three, Bucks, Hendricks and Meigs, the attorney-general was the least known to him. Prior to his nomination on the State ticket Meigs had been best known as the most astute criminal lawyer in the State, his astuteness lying not so much in his ability as a pleader as in a certain oratorical gift by which he was able to convince not only a jury but the public of the entire innocence of his client.

He was a small man physically, with womanish hands and feet, and a beardless face of that prematurely aged cast which is oftenest seen in dwarfs and precocious infants; and his distinguishing characteristic, the one which stuck longest in the mind of a chance acquaintance or a casual observer, was a smile of the congealed sort which served to mask whatever emotion there might be behind it.

Kent had seen little of Meigs since the latter had turned him down in the _quo warranto_ matter; and his guard went up quickly when the attorney-general accosted him in the lobby of the hotel and asked for a private interview.

"I am very much occupied just now, Mr. Meigs," he demurred; "but if it is a matter of importance----"

"It is; a matter of the greatest importance," was the smooth-toned reply.

"I am sure you will not regret it if you will give me a few moments, Mr.

Kent."

Kent decided quickly. Being forewarned, there was nothing to fear.