II THE ALTAR ON THE HILL: The Secretary

I

Thomas Patrick Finnerty entered his house and closed the door behind him. He liked this closing of the house door every evening, the shutting out of the world from Mary and himself. He had, too, a sense of increased importance. On the street he was only one of a mass of similar men, perhaps a trifle more humble, even a size or so smaller than most of them. But once inside his house he was by way of being a god.

But a very young and gentle god. Even an apologetic god.

“I’m afraid I’m late, honey,” he said, at the kitchen door.

“I only hope the chops aren’t spoiled.”

“I’m not very hungry, anyhow.” He drew himself up a little. “The Chief took me to lunch to-day.”

It had been a great event, this going out with the Chief to luncheon. He could still see the eyes of the office on them, could almost hear the buzz that followed their departure. But Mary was unimpressed.

“I should think he might!” she said. “The way you slave for him.”

“Well, he’s a great man. Any way you look at it, he’s a great man,” said Pat, loyally. He looked at her. She was not beautiful; her chin receded, and her throat was long and full, a nervous, sensitive throat. But her eyes were soft and limpid, and whenever she looked at Thomas Patrick they were full of pride and love. However, she was not looking at him now, and he caught a quiver of that tell-tale throat.

“What have you got against him anyhow?” he inquired. It was the only subject on which they differed, and to-night with the memory of that luncheon and its conversation in his mind it troubled him. He hated differing with anybody.

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“He paid my doctor bill last summer.”

“I know it. You’ve told me often enough.”

“Then what is it? You don’t deny he’s a big man?”

“Not with you around, I don’t!”

She dished up the supper, and he trotted after her into the little dining room. His faithful eyes were anxious. If he could only make Mary see the Chief as he saw him, all would be well; a big man, doing big things. Not that he didn’t—well, a man who worked like that had to play sometimes. The bigger the man sometimes, the more violent the reactions. He didn’t quite understand the Chief, that way, but then he wasn’t there to understand. He was only his secretary.

He studied Mary as she ate.

“There’s something in your mind about him,” he persisted.

“Well, look at his wife.”

“What about her?”

“She doesn’t look happy, does she?”

“She’s sick,” said Thomas Patrick. “She’s been on the edge of nervous prostration for years.”

“And what gives her that?” Mary demanded.

Thomas Patrick put down his napkin.

“If you’re blaming him for that,” he said earnestly, “let me tell you something. If ever a man was good to his wife, he is. Only the other day she wanted some silver fox, and she had it in twenty-four hours. And he’s got a standing order at the florists’ for her. I’ve got her birthday and their wedding anniversary on the calendar, and all I’ve got to do—”

“You do it, don’t you?”

“He’s always sending her presents. I don’t do that, do I? He selects them and he pays for them. And what’s more, she hasn’t the sense to stick by him. She’s away half the time. If a woman wants to keep her husband she’s got to stick around.”

“Oh, really!” said Mary.

But it was impossible that he and Mary should quarrel. They loved each other too much. He had no more doubt of Mary’s love for him than of his for her. They were different sorts of love, of course. For instance, he was never jealous of Mary, but she was frequently jealous of him.

“What about that new stenographer you’ve got down there? Is she pretty?” she would say.

“Why, I don’t know,” he would answer, and deliberate as though the matter had not occurred to him before. “No, hardly; not my sort, anyhow.”

“What is your sort?”

“You,” he would say, and smile his boyish smile.

Or:

“Don’t you have a lot of women coming and going there?”

“Some. Not so many.”

“What sort?”

“Old ladies about estates, middle-aged ones fighting the income tax. Why?”

“I just wondered.”

He was not fooled at all. Oh, he was very shrewd, this little Thomas Patrick Finnerty, with his loyal Irish eyes and his warm Irish heart.

“Look here, honey,” he would say sometimes, “don’t you get any foolishness into your head. I never look at any woman but you. I never have and I never will.”

But it pleased him, rather. It invented for him the pleasant little fiction that there was a devil in every man, including himself, and that he, Thomas Patrick Finnerty, had successfully subdued that devil.

On those evenings when, on his return, he found Mary unusually “dolled up,” as he called it, and knew that again some hidden fear in her was making her reach out to hold him, he almost filled the little house with sheer pride of sex.

Even her dislike of the Chief was the purest jealousy. She wanted no mixed devotion. She could not see, somehow, that the one could never detract from the other; added to it, rather.

He dried the dishes for her that night, rather humbly coaxing her into good humour again. And he had finally succeeded when Mrs. Tufts, whose husband was doorkeeper at the Lyric Theatre, came from next door to borrow some eggs. She opened the door on them in each other’s arms, and Thomas Patrick, of all things, was kissing that sensitive, tremulous throat.

“Well now, I never saw the like of you two!” she said. “I’d like to bring Jim Tufts right here and show him something.”

She got the eggs and went away, not knowing how many times in the months to come she was to remember that little scene, and try to reconcile it with what had followed.

II

It was after the Tufts woman had gone that Mary recognised some subtle change in Thomas Patrick, a sort of mysterious excitement. He could not sit still, but walked around, jingling the small change in his pocket. He seemed, too, to be eyeing the furniture with a sort of appraisal.

“Made no mistake over this dining room set,” he said once.

He even wandered into the parlour, and stood awhile in front of the leather self-rocker, which they were still paying for.

“Darned good chair,” he said.

“Kind of like yourself this evening, don’t you?”

“Just thinking how lucky I am,” he said, rather shyly.

But when she suggested seeing Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood, he did not show his usual enthusiasm.

“I’ll go if you want to, honey,” he said. “But I’m sort of tired, myself.”

Mary eyed him. She knew that better than anything he loved a Fairbanks picture. He would sit, small and self-effacing in the darkness, and in his soul it was he who was fighting and riding on the screen. His were the reckless smile, the bravado and bluster, that moved before him. She had felt him stiffen for the leap when the hero dropped from a balcony onto his horse.

Almost he himself galloped away!

“I don’t care much about it,” she said, and watched him again.

He went upstairs rather early, and laid out his best shirt for the morning, putting in the buttons neatly and examining his shoes. And when bedtime came she was electrified to find that he had brought out his new white madras pajamas, kept for sickness, and was putting them on.

The shirt had aroused her ever-ready suspicions. The pajamas lulled them. And when, after his nightly custom, he came around to “tuck her into bed” she put up her arms and drew him down to her.

“You’re the best man in the world, Pat,” she said.

“I’m not good enough for you, honey.” She was to remember that later.

It was when they were both tucked away that he broached his great news, in the darkness and fumbling about for her hand.

“How’d you like to live in Washington?”

She sat upright.

“Washington? You’re crazy.”

“The Chief’s going to run for Senator.”

Mary was silent, considering the news.

“He’ll never get it.”

“You bet he will.”

“Him a Senator!” said Mary, with a sniff.

“Now look here, honey—”

“Well, I’m not moving the furniture yet!” she said, and settled back on her pillow.

He lay still, staring into the darkness. If only Mary could see the Chief as he saw him in the office; receiving great men with a nod; making his quick, sure decisions; the office a dead thing until he came and then vitalised into action, into importance—if only Mary could see the greatness in the man!

And after a time he felt Mary’s hand groping for his.

“I’m sorry, Pat,” she said, “I guess I’m just jealous of him. That’s all. But I’d love to go to Washington.”

He was suddenly very happy. They would go to Washington, and up on Capitol Hill the Chief would do his great work for the nation. Then, on days when the Chief was to speak, Mary could sit in the gallery of the Senate and listen to him.

She would see then how he stood out from the ruck of common men. Why, he looked a Senator; big and handsome and powerful. Perhaps he would even be President some day. He considered that. “Mr. Thomas P. Finnerty, secretary to the President, to-day gave out the following statement—”

Mary would like that.

III

With the announcement of the Chief’s candidacy things began to change in the office. The day’s routine was put through quickly, and after that came a series of conferences. Sometimes it was one man, closeted with the Chief for a prolonged period; again it would be a delegation, and the office would be thick with the smoke of the Chief’s cigars when it had gone.

There were always newspaper men, too. Thomas Patrick knew them all soon, even the ones belonging to the opposition press. He would pass out his neatly typed statements to them with a small pucker of worry on his face.

“We’re being square with you fellows,” he would say, anxiously. “So you be square with us.”

“Square!” the opposition would snort on his departure, stuffing the pages into its pockets.

“Well, the kid’s square.”

The Chief was making a fine campaign, and what was more, he had ceased “playing.”

“Boss is certainly walking the chalk line,” the chief clerk observed to Thomas Patrick. “Not so many telephone calls on his private wire, eh what?”

“How do you know they weren’t on business?”

“Then that sort of business is darned poor just now,” said the chief clerk, and grinned.

“If talk of that kind gets to the press—”

“Oh, I’m not a damned fool,” said the chief clerk, and sauntered off.

The book containing that secret page was apparently closed, and Thomas Patrick was relieved and happy. But as time went on he began to understand why it had ever been written. In spite of the crowds and the adulation, the Chief was a lonely man. He began to see, dimly, that loneliness may drive a man to seek company along a crooked path.

And his wife was away again.

“Gone to some fool sanitarium,” he said to Mary, with disgust.

“Maybe she’s sick.”

“She could be sick at home, couldn’t she?”

But Mary understood loneliness, if she couldn’t disloyalty, and she no longer objected when now and then, the Chief took Thomas Patrick home to dinner.

“We’ll eat something,” the Chief would say, “and then we’ll do a little work.”

And Thomas Patrick would sit, very small and self-conscious, at the table, and be served by a butler and a footman in white gloves. The awful silence and dignity oppressed him. And across from him the Chief would make conversation, in his kindly way, and finally send the servants out. Then they would talk, man to man.

And sometimes Thomas Patrick felt, as he shut the house door behind him and went away, that the Chief rather dreaded his going, that he hated being left alone.

Thomas Patrick seemed to grow in height at that time. He began to feel that the Chief was leaning on him, and he assumed a sort of protective attitude. It was he now who looked to see if the Chief’s great coat was in the car, and when they began to make trips to outlying districts, it was he who brought a revolver and kept it in the car thereafter, for fear of thugs.

And, to complete his happiness, one day the Chief gave him the key of a safe deposit box, and told him to bring its contents back with him. He brought back a sealed manila envelope, exhaling a faint odor of scent, and laid it on the Chief’s desk. The Chief looked at it, and then at Thomas Patrick.

“When you’re as old as I am, Pat,” he said, soberly, “you’ll learn that you don’t find happiness by chasing up an alley after it.”

He took a box of matches and going into his private washroom, put the contents of the envelope into a bowl and set fire to them. He stood by until they slowly burned up, and Thomas Patrick felt that he was observing a ceremony.

But the Chief’s wife did not come back. She was taking a new cure of some sort, and it promised to be lengthy. And as time went on, and the Chief showed fatigue and nervous strain, Thomas Patrick began to be anxious again.

He was always gentle to Thomas Patrick, but when they were having dinner at the big house he was sometimes sharp with the servants. And after dinner, in the library, there began to be times when he would stop dictating and, lying back in his chair, would stare abstractedly at the painting of a fleshy, almost nude woman, over the mantelpiece.

It was a Sir Thomas Lely, although of course Thomas Patrick did not know it, and the Chief’s wife had bought it and put it there, with a light over the top. It was considered a very handsome picture.

“You and Mary getting along all right?” he asked once, after such an interval.

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s right. Hold onto her!” said the Chief. “She’s a good girl, Pat.”

“She is, indeed. She’s—she’s wonderful.”

Mary was most awfully pleased when he told her that conversation.

But, as a matter of fact, it was after just such an evening that the trouble began. There had been no letter from the Chief’s wife that day, for one thing, and he seemed to have expected one. Then when they got to the house there it was, and Thomas Patrick saw the Chief’s face set somewhat as he read it.

“Well, I guess we’ll bach it for awhile longer, Pat,” he said. And laughed, a little recklessly.

He was restless and abstracted after dinner, and something before nine he got out of his chair.

“I’ve gone stale, Pat,” he said. “Better give it up for to-night.” He looked at his watch. “Might freshen me up to see a show or something. Do you good, too. How about it?”

Thomas Patrick flushed with pleasure.

“All right with me, sir,” he said.

There are certain moments which stand out in a lifetime, glorious soul-swelling moments when the full flavour of joyous existence is being tasted. Thomas Patrick, behind the Chief, being passed into the Lyric Theatre with a bow from the business manager and a wave of the hand; Thomas Patrick stepping into a box behind the Chief and seeing the house turn en masse to stare; Thomas Patrick, very erect while a small burst of applause interrupted the program and the Chief bowed—great moments these, unforgettable.

If only Mary had been in the audience!

Now and then during the evening he eyed the Chief, who was very calm, and apparently quite oblivious of the faces turned toward him; oblivious, too, of the attention he was receiving from the stage. There was a girl in blue who sang an entire song to him, but the Chief appeared to be only slightly amused and a trifle bored. Indeed, toward the end of the second act he seemed to lose interest in the stage and fell to writing something in his notebook. Evidently the staleness had passed, and that great mind of his was functioning again.

He took another look at his program and then tore out the page from his notebook and wrote something on it. Then he passed it to Thomas Patrick.

“The stage door’s behind this box, Pat,” he said. “Slip out before the curtain falls and give this message to that girl in the blue dress. Her name’s Elliot. Lily Elliot. Give it to her, you understand?”

Thomas Patrick felt a little sick. The hand that took the note even shook a little.

“Don’t you think, sir—” he ventured.

The Chief gave him an odd look.

“Don’t you worry, Pat,” he said. “I’ll do the thinking! I’m only asking her out to supper.”

Thomas Patrick stopped outside the box and considered, his heart beating furiously. Damn the girl! Damn the Chief’s fool of a wife! Damn all women—except Mary. But the Chief had turned and was watching him. He opened the door and went behind.

He was some time in finding the Elliot girl’s dressing room. Stage hands jostled him; he tripped over a wire cable and a dozen men yelled at him. He wandered about, a queer timid figure in a ridiculous necktie, and all the time something in him was whispering: “I wish he wouldn’t. Oh, I wish he wouldn’t.”

The Elliot girl, her make-up absurdly accentuated away from the footlights, a kimono very negligently thrown around her, took the note and read it.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“His secretary.”

“Hm!” she said, and looked him over. “That’s him in the stage box, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Tell him all right.”

As he went out of the dressing room he suddenly saw Mr. Tufts, sitting in a chair at the stage entrance. Mr. Tufts, however, was reading a newspaper.

“Worked pretty late, didn’t you?” said Mary, that night, when he had locked the house and tiptoed up the stairs.

Thomas Patrick hesitated. Then:

“Yes,” he said.

IV

From the beginning Thomas Patrick had realised that there is more in a political campaign than meets the eye. Therefore he was neither surprised nor suspicious when one morning the Chief told him to hire a deposit box at the Republic Trust in his own name.

“And give me the keys,” he said. “Certain amount of confidential stuff oughtn’t to be floating around.”

So Thomas Patrick rented a box, and rather proudly signed his name on the card. Some of these days he and Mary would have such a box. He often felt now that the deed for their house should be in a safer place than under the paper in the bureau drawer. And later on, when he occasionally took a sealed manila envelope to the Trust Company he enjoyed going into the basement of the bank, where uniformed attendants swung open the enormous door to the vaults, and he was able to gain an access impossible to the shrewdest cracksmen in the business.

Next to being great oneself was being attached to greatness.

Greatly to his relief the Elliot matter seemed to have gone no further. The campaign was in full swing now, and successfully so. Now and then he went with the Chief here and there, and from the back of a hall listened with swelling pride to the speeches he himself had helped to prepare. He would treasure the pleasant things he heard and tell the Chief on the way back.

“Surely had them going to-night, sir,” he would say.

“Think so?”

“It was sticking out all over them. One fellow near me, he said: ‘Talks like a Senator, and by God, he looks like one!’ ”

“Humph!” the Chief would say, and perhaps straighten his tie.

There were no more evenings at the house now, and Thomas Patrick missed them. But the Chief seemed happier, in the thick of things as he was now, and to miss his wife less. He was fairly confident, too.

“Mary like the idea of Washington?” he asked once.

“She’s crazy about it.”

“You’ll have to have more money there,” he said, in his large way. “It costs a lot to live there.”

It seemed impossible for a human being to be happier than Thomas Patrick Finnerty was, in those days. Nor less suspicious.

If he had felt no distrust at the renting of the safe deposit box, he felt even less when he learned one day that the Chief felt the need of private quarters of his own. Thomas Patrick was becoming an old campaigner, and he began to see that it was sometimes necessary to give the people what was good for them rather than what they wanted, and even to conceal the fact that they were being done good. Also the opposition was growing bitter, and there was talk of a leak in the office.

“I have to see a lot of fellows,” the Chief explained, “that I don’t want to take to the house. And with reporters hanging about all the time, I can’t see them here.”

“Yes, sir,” said Thomas Patrick, enormously flattered at this confidence.

“What I think you’d better do,” said the Chief, considering, “is to rent me an apartment somewhere. In your own name. You might try the Burleigh. I understand they have some.”

“They’re pretty expensive.”

“Well, we’ll charge it to campaign expenses!” said the Chief.

Thomas Patrick was very busy the next few days. He took the apartment, and equipped it with various things evidently necessary to a political campaign, cigars in quantity, a poker table and chips, and the Chief’s particular brand of cigarettes, but without his monogram, of course. And he paid the first month’s rent in advance out of a checking account of his own, established for the purpose.

Thomas Patrick had a curious feeling of being a secret and powerful figure in national affairs. The only drawback was that Mary could not share this inner knowledge with him.

“All set, sir!” he announced to the Chief one afternoon, as he handed over the keys.

“Fine,” said the Chief.

He drew his check book toward him and made out a check. Then he tore it out and passed it over; it was to Thomas Patrick Finnerty, for five hundred dollars. Thomas Patrick coloured to the roots of his nondescript hair.

“I didn’t do it for money,” he stammered.

“Campaign expenses, Pat!” said the Chief. And then he did an unusual thing. He got up and put his hand on Thomas Patrick’s shoulder. “You’ve stuck by me, Pat,” he said, “and I don’t forget those things.”

Never, save when Mary agreed to marry him, had Thomas Patrick been so happy. And the Chief’s touch on his shoulder meant more than the money in his hand.

“I guess I won’t thank you,” he said huskily. “I guess you know I’ll go on sticking, sir. I guess I’m that kind.”

The Chief was touched. He knew devotion when he saw it, and he knew too that there wasn’t too much of it floating about. Also, his own generosity exalted him; he was, so to speak, carried on the wave of it a bit further than perhaps he had meant to go.

“How about taking that ‘campaign’ check,” he suggested, “and buying fifty shares of B. T. & P. on a ten dollar margin? I understand there’s something doing there.”

“But suppose it goes down?”

“Oh, I could carry you all right. But I don’t think it will.”

The total result of which was that three days later on Thomas Patrick Finnerty cashed in a seven hundred dollar profit, making twelve hundred in all, and bought himself immediately a pair of new shoes, not before they were badly needed.

He had not told Mary. She feared and hated speculation, for one thing. Not, of course, that he was going to speculate any more. He was through. And the second reason was that their wedding anniversary was due on the fourth of the next month. He was going to give it all to her then, as a present.

At first he meant to give it to her in a check. Then—oh, he was cunning—he thought of a better way. He would cash it, and first of all he would hand her a ten-dollar bill.

“Thought you might prefer buying your own present,” he would say.

“Oh, Pat! You’re a darling. I’ll get—” Well, maybe she would say silk stockings. She was crazy about silk stockings.

“Then you might want to spend this, too,” he would say, airily. And lay another bill in her lap.

And so on, through the whole amount. She would grow silent after awhile, and just sit staring. And then perhaps her throat would work a little and she would cry. Laughing, too, of course. She had a funny way of doing both together sometimes.

“Kinda set us up in Washington, eh what?” he would say. And she would hold onto him as if she would never let go.

He was sublimely happy. He held his head higher now as he walked home from the office, and often he came in whistling.

“You’d think you were going to be a Senator yourself,” Mary said sometimes.

“Maybe I will.”

“Two new neckties, too!” she said. “Some night I’m going to call up the Chief’s house and see if you’re really there. Maybe you have a girl somewhere.”

“Maybe I have!” said Thomas Patrick, strutting about with his secret.

But, as it happened, he did not carry out his plan entirely. Nobody can say exactly why some small patch of apparently extraneous material sometimes creeps into the fabric of a life, and entirely alters the whole thing. But it happened now.

One night he saw Mary reading a newspaper advertisement of fur coats, poring over it in her absorbed fashion, and he had his brilliant idea.

“Look pretty good, don’t they?” he said, over her shoulder.

“They’re half price.” But she added, for fear of hurting him, “I don’t want one, you know. My suit’s as good as ever.”

“Well, we’re not in the fur coat class. Not yet,” he said craftily. “Some of these days—”

“—when you’re President!” said Mary.

On the evening of their anniversary he staggered up the street with a huge box, and set it carefully inside the hall door. Then he wandered back. Mary was dressed with unusual care, and he could see flowers on the dining room table.

“Going to have company?” he inquired nonchalantly.

“Company?”

“All dressed up, aren’t you?”

“Why, Pat!” she said, with a little quiver of her full throat. “You don’t mean to say—!”

“Great Scott!” he said. “Who’d ever believe I’d go and forget it?”

He tried to take her in his arms, but she evaded him.

“You forgot it!” she said. “You’re tired of me. I’ve been seeing it for some time. I’m not pretty—oh, no, I’m not—and you’re going up in the world and I’m standing still.”

“Why, Mary!”

“Oh, it’s true. Everybody sees the difference. Mrs. Tufts was here to-day, giving me a talk about holding a husband. ‘They’re a slippery lot,’ she said. ‘The minute you sit back and let go your hold, they’re off.’ That’s what she said.”

“I was only fooling, honey.”

“Oh, you say that now.”

“If you don’t believe me, come out in the hall.”

Just a fur coat, and not a very grand one at that, but how it changed the whole atmosphere of the little house that night! With Mary crying and laughing—wouldn’t one know she would do that?—and Thomas Patrick standing her up in it and turning her around. Showing her the hidden pockets, and the depth of the fur, and even the quality of the lining, and then fastening the storm collar up over her throat and fetching down a hat, any old hat, to get the complete effect.

And later on Mary—she was clever, he thought—covering an old coat hanger with cotton and muslin, so no wear should come to it from the hanging away. Even the final depositing of it in a special closet, and locking it up, and finding a place to hide the key—all of it more or less sacramental.

She had accepted his explanation of it without question. The Chief had given him a check for the extra work, and who should he spend it on if not on her?

“You needed a new overcoat,” she said.

“Oh, I’ll get that, all right,” he said in that strange new lordly manner of his. “We’re on the up curve, old lady. I’m telling you.”

But after they had gone to bed, he lay for some time staring at the darkness. What had Mrs. Tufts meant, that afternoon? Had Tufts by any chance seen him at the theatre?

V

It was about a week after that that events began to move with fatal rapidity.

Thomas Patrick had been out of the office all the afternoon, and when he got home that evening it was to find Mary with a curious set look about her mouth, and dinner not ready.

“His wife’s been here,” she said.

“The Chief’s? When did she get back?”

“To-day. She’d had a bill for a fur coat sent to her by mistake. I guess that brought her.”

“A fur coat!” said Thomas Patrick, with the pulses beating in his neck.

“That’s what I said. And when she went to the office and asked him about it he said he’d told you to get one for me and charge it to him.”

He was trembling now with fear and anger.

“She had her nerve, coming to you!”

“It’s her husband.”

“What did you tell her?”

“What could I say? Tell her he was buying fur coats for another woman?”

“How do you know that? How do you know that wasn’t your fur coat on his bill?”

“Was it?”

He hesitated. Only once before had he lied to Mary.

“Yes,” he said shortly, and went upstairs.

Dinner was very silent. Mary’s eyes seldom met his and she ate very little, but it was not until she was carrying out the plates that she came out with what was in her mind.

“I’m just wondering,” she said, “how often you’ve lied to me before.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I saw the bill for that coat. It wasn’t bought where mine came from.” She deposited her plates in the kitchen and came back. “What sort of a hold has he got on you, anyhow?” she demanded. “You’d lie for him. I believe you’d steal or kill for him.”

“You lied to save her, didn’t you?”

“That’s different,” said Mary shortly. “She hadn’t done anything. But he’s as crooked about women as a dog’s hind leg, and you’d lie to protect him.”

She went into the kitchen and closed the door.

Had he been less inarticulate he might have explained to her; that a great man may have his weaknesses, and yet be great; that he must be protected from those weaknesses in order to remain great; and his own feeling that the Chief’s wife might be virtuous, and yet be as guilty as the Chief.

But he could not talk. He never had any words for great moments.

He got out his papers and spread them on the dining room table, but he did not work much. His mind kept running back to that phrase of Mary’s: “What sort of a hold has he got on you anyhow?” And beyond the closed door, where Mary was working in sombre silence, he knew she was thinking of that, too. Suspecting him, of God knows what. Perhaps even putting her fur coat in what she had once scornfully termed a “conscience fund.”

He heard Mary finish her work, and braced himself for her entrance. But she did not come in. Instead, he heard the back door open and shut, and knew she had gone to the Tufts’.

He felt strangely oppressed and anxious, and very alone. He had always been alone until the Chief and Mary had come into his life, and on them he had lavished all he had. Now Mary seemed miles away. And the Chief—if only the election was over and the Chief was busy with great affairs! Out of temptation, so to speak. A Senator could not travel in shady by-paths. He must stand in the sunlight.

He got his hat and went out. Somehow he dreaded seeing Mary again after she had been at the Tufts’. He would let her sleep on the situation, and in the morning things would look different.

He walked endless miles. He had no particular physique, and when he grew very tired he found a bench in a public square and sat down. Once he lit a match and looked at his watch. It was only eleven o’clock. Then—he was very tired—he dozed off, and it was one when he roused himself and hurried home.

There was a light in the dining room and it frightened him. Mary was sitting there, waiting for him. Waiting with what she had heard from Mr. Tufts, to confront him with it. She would never believe that he had only carried a message to the Elliot girl. She would be sitting there, her poor throat working, imagining all sorts of terrible things.

He opened the door and slipped into the house, quite white with anxiety and excitement.

Mary was at the table, leaning her elbows on it. She had been crying, and as he moved along the little hall he heard her say:

“Here he is now.”

Then she was not alone. Mr. Tufts, perhaps, waiting to——

There was a police officer standing on the other side of the table.

The room began to whirl, and Thomas Patrick caught the door frame to steady himself.

“Well?” he said. His voice did not sound like his own.

Mary was standing now, he could see through a sort of black mist, standing and searching his face with reddened, terrified eyes. Then he was in the room, and the policeman had closed the door and was putting him into a chair.

“Better sit down a minute,” he was saying. “No hurry.” And to Mary: “You haven’t a bit of liquor in the house, have you? He needs it.”

“No.”

His head cleared a little, and he looked again at Mary, this strange, frozen Mary who never came near him, but stood staring with those dreadful eyes.

“I went out for a walk,” he said. “Then I got tired and sat down, and—”

“All right, son,” the officer broke in. “We’ll have all that, later—no need of worrying the wife, y’understand.”

Suddenly Mary spoke.

“Pat!” she said tensely, “for God’s sake speak up. Tell him you didn’t even know this Lily Elliot; tell him to go home and let us go to bed. Get him out of here. What’s he doing here, worrying us to death? We’re not criminals.”

It was about the Elliot girl. Then the Chief— The mist was going, and wariness crept into his blue Irish eyes. It was a political frame-up, a stall. The opposition was behind this. Well, let them get something from him if they could.

“I’m not talking, one way or the other,” he said cannily.

“Pat!”

“I’m not talking, I tell you,” he addressed the policeman stubbornly. “I’m not playing dirty politics for anybody, and you can chase that up an alley and kill it!”

But it seemed the policeman was not trying to make him talk. It appeared, too, that all that was wanted of him was to go somewhere, and that Mary was to go to bed and not to worry. Long after, all that came back to him, wiped out though it had been by the events that followed. He remembered kissing Mary, and the frightened desperate way in which she had clung to him, and a police car waiting around the corner, and that silent drive to the City Hall.

It was only when he got to the City Hall that he knew he was under arrest.

“What for?” he demanded, feverishly. “I’ve got a right to know, haven’t I?”

“You’ll be able to do your talking in a minute,” some one said.

Then he was in the detective board room, with Stuart, the Chief of detectives across a table from him, and half a dozen newspaper men standing round. Some of them he knew, and there was curiosity in their eyes, and pity.

Pity? For what?

VI

The sight of the reporters put him on his guard. Stuart was part of the opposition. They were trying one of their political tricks on him, that was all. Well, they could all go to hell; they’d get nothing out of him.

Stuart was talking, an eye on the reporters.

“Some time ago,” Stuart said, “you rented an apartment at the Burleigh, in your own name, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“Was that apartment for your own use?”

He hesitated. Better keep the Chief’s name out as long as possible.

“Yes,” he said slowly.

“And in it you installed a girl from the Lyric Theatre, Lily Elliot.”

Patrick Thomas’s face turned an ashy grey.

“That’s a lie,” he shouted. “I never—”

He checked himself. Stuart was grinning at the reporters.

“What about it?” he demanded, furiously. “Don’t beat about the bush. And quit grinning, damn you!”

“You admit you knew the Elliot girl?”

“I’d met her.”

“You bet you had,” Stuart said grimly. “Now the question’s this, Finnerty. Did you rent that apartment for yourself or for somebody else? Don’t stall, and don’t try to protect anybody. I want the truth.”

“What’s it all about, anyhow?” he asked fretfully. “If you’re trying to plant anything on—anybody, you’ll get nothing out of me.”

“Was it for yourself, or for some one else?”

“I’ve told you that.”

“And you kept it up, out of your salary, I suppose!”

Some of the newspaper men laughed, but Stuart made a motion for silence.

“I’d—been speculating,” said Thomas Patrick. “In B. T. & P.”

“Ah, look here, Stuart,” a reporter said, “let the kid alone. You know darned well—”

“Keep out or get out,” Stuart replied grimly. He leaned back in his chair and surveyed Thomas Patrick.

“Where were you to-night between ten and eleven o’clock?”

“Taking a walk.”

“Oh, you were, eh!”

He reached forward, opened a drawer of his desk and laid a revolver on it.

“You never saw that before, either, I suppose?”

Thomas Patrick gazed at the revolver. Then he leaned forward and picking it up, examined it. Suddenly it clattered to the floor, and Thomas Patrick leaped to his feet.

“Something’s happened to the Chief!” he shouted. “Let me out of here. You damned fools, keeping me here, when he’s in trouble! I—!”

“Sit down, Finnerty,” Stuart said mildly. “He’s all right. But I see you recognise his revolver.”

Thomas Patrick sat down, trembling. But the last trace of haze had gone, exploded with that outburst.

“Who said it was his revolver?”

“Isn’t it?”

“I bought it. It’s mine, if you want to know. It’s registered in my name.”

“Don’t be a fool,” Stuart said sharply. “Between ten and eleven o’clock to-night the Elliot woman was shot and killed in that apartment of yours at the Burleigh. With that revolver. Now go on and hang yourself if you want to.”

The revolver lay on the floor, and Thomas Patrick sat staring at it—now it seemed black and shiny, and again it was blood-red. It made these shifts of colour with extreme rapidity, so that he was obliged to blink.

“Well?” said Stuart.

“It changes,” said Thomas Finnerty, in an absent voice. “Makes me dizzy looking at it. Kinda sick, too. I—”

He seemed to be stooping to pick up the revolver, but instead he fell forward on his face and lay there in a very peaceful faint. It was the first peace he had had for a good many hours.

When he came around he was very quiet. One of the reporters opened the drawer of a desk and got out a bottle of whisky, pouring some in a glass and mixing it with water at the cooler. But he waved it away.

They asked him innumerable questions, but to most of them he simply said: “I don’t know,” or “I’m not talking any.” On one or two things, however, he was very firm. He had rented the apartment for himself, and the revolver was his. He “didn’t remember” where he had gone on that walk of his. Mostly his replies were rather absent, as if he had to rouse himself to answer them. He would forget them—the men there—altogether between questions, or while Stuart drew circles and squares on the blotter in front of him, and be back at home with Mary, trying to explain to her.

“But don’t you see?” he would say. “You take a big man like that, and once you let his name get mixed up in a thing like this, he’s gone. Gone.”

“But suppose he did it?”

“Don’t you believe it. How d’you know she didn’t do it herself? Or maybe that crowd of drunks that hung around him, maybe one of them got funny. Or there was a fight, or something.”

What with talking with Mary, and having every now and then to listen to Stuart, he got very tired. His head would droop, and then Stuart would spring at him some question designed to trap him.

“When did your Chief meet Lily Elliot?” he would say, for instance. And Thomas Patrick’s tired eyes would unclose and he would say:

“I don’t know he ever met her.”

Finally Stuart gave it up and sent him off to be locked up. But he talked a little first.

“You’re doing your best,” he said, “according to your lights. But he’s not worth it, Finnerty. No man is. Murphy says you’ve got a wife at home. You’ve got her to consider. Get some sleep and think it over.”

“I’m not worried about my wife,” said Thomas Patrick. “She understands me and I understand her.”

He looked about the room, and his eyes fell on the reporters.

“I’d be kinda glad,” he said, “if one of you fellows’d go around there in the morning and see her. Just tell her it’s all right, y’understand? Everything’s all right.”

Down in the dingy press room, with its typewriters, its telephone booths, and its scribbled walls, the group of reporters held small and informal conclave that night. There was the whale of a story, or there wasn’t any story at all.

He was a pretty square kid, they finally decided. And he had lied like a gentleman. Also, he had put a pretty definite crimp in Stuart. “Never got a thing out of him,” they said with unholy joy.

In the end they decided there would be no story.

They brought out the bottle from the Detective Board room, and had a drink all round.

“Here’s to loyalty,” said Herrald, of the Gazette, “which the highly intelligent believe in, and only fools practise.”

VII

Thomas Patrick dropped asleep very quickly after they had put him in a cell. He slept heavily, his mouth a trifle open, his figure sprawled. But toward morning he put an arm out to hold Mary, and she was not there. That roused him.

He sat up and thought things over. The Chief, of course, would be around in the morning and explain everything. Of course he hadn’t shot her. He probably didn’t even know about it. She had shot herself. Those women were always doing that sort of thing, taking poison or something. They seemed to go as far as they could, and then at last they reached the end of the road, and—

She had been a pretty girl. He’d thought that night, seeing her on the stage, that she had a look of Mary about her. Of course in the wings, with that make-up on her—and now she was dead.

Well, by and large, she’d left a lot of trouble behind her. The Chief’s wife, now. It was going to be hard on her; she’d been suspicious anyhow. And she’d never understood the Chief as, for instance, Mary understood him. Just as like as not she’d raise a fuss, just when a fuss might be fatal. And she’d never see that if she’d just stuck by, if she’d given him, Thomas Patrick Finnerty, a bit of a hold to help the Chief over a slippery place, it would never have happened.

Toward dawn he grew restless and took to pacing the floor in his stockings. He had taken off his shoes. The fear he had fought down all night began to rise in him, and with it claustrophobia, a terror of being shut in. The walls seemed contracting on him; he could hardly breathe.

Odds and ends of thoughts came to the surface of his mind and then sunk again: men who had paced floors like this, waiting for morning and the chair; Mary alone in bed, crying; the Chief, perhaps, getting his first knowledge in the morning paper, and trying to smile across the breakfast table at his wife; his old father saying to him, “We Irish may be a bit weak in the head, but we’re strong in the heart.” Mary’s fur coat. Mr. Tufts. The safe deposit box and its seven hundred dollars. The rent money.

He dismissed this last at once. The Chief would look after that. He would look after everything. And when all this was over they would go to Washington, and maybe Mary in the gallery seeing the Chief at work on the nation’s business would understand him at last.

As always, the thought of the Chief steadied him, and when he refused his breakfast it was with a grin.

“I’ll be eating mine at home!” he said. “Anyhow, I don’t hear your cooking here highly recommended.”

“Ordered your taxi yet?”

“Taxi nothing. Limousine!” he said, and grinned again.

The morning seemed a day in length, but it was only ten o’clock when his cell was unlocked and he was taken to a small room to see a visitor. He had been so sure it would be Mary that he had trembled with excitement all the way. If only they left him alone with her, so he could explain! She would believe him. She must.

But it was only Mr. Marks, the Chief’s friend and attorney. In his disappointment he did not even see the visitor’s hand.

“I’m sorry, my boy, terribly sorry,” said Mr. Marks. And sat down. He was plainly nervous. “The—the Chief has asked me to look after you, and so—”

“He knows about it, does he?”

Mr. Marks looked slightly surprised and a trifle wary.

“Yes, of course. He—”

“Then why didn’t he come himself? I sat up pretty nearly all night lying for him.”

Mr. Marks looked about him anxiously, but the guard had moved away.

“He can’t very well come,” he said, “not under the circumstances. But he appreciates what you’ve done greatly. You’ve saved him, and you’ve saved the party.”

“I did it for him,” said Thomas Finnerty doggedly. “The party hadn’t a God-damned thing to do with it.”

“No. Of course not,” Mr. Marks agreed with alacrity. “But it becomes a party matter, nevertheless. A scandal like this, breaking at this time, would be fatal.”

“The scandal’s on me, isn’t it?”

“Not entirely,” said Mr. Marks, and bent forward. “Just how far are you prepared to go in this thing, Pat? I needn’t tell you it won’t be forgotten.”

“Meaning—money?” asked Thomas Patrick, slowly. His face had turned scarlet.

“You’ll have stood a certain amount of anxiety,” Mr. Marks said delicately. “You’re entitled to compensation.”

“Did he send me that message?”

Mr. Marks saw the error in his strategy, and like a wise general retreated in time.

“No,” he said. “It was an idea of my own. That’s all. And of course it was based on the hope that you would go through with it.”

“How far have I got to go?”

Mr. Marks relaxed a trifle and leaned back again.

“Not as far as you think. It wasn’t—murder.”

“She did it herself?”

“No,” said Mr. Marks. “There’d been a poker party, and considerable drinking. The Chief had left his revolver lying about, and one of the men picked it up. He was playing with it when it went off. There’s no case, you see. It was purely accidental.”

“Then where do I come in?”

But he came in, he found, very definitely. There would be a verdict of accidental death; that had already been arranged with the coroner. But the opposition was hard at work, trying to connect the Chief with it, and so to raise a scandal.

“It’s a dirty business, any way you look at it,” Mr. Marks said. “If you’ll stick, we’ll swing the thing right, Pat. But if you don’t, we’re gone. And—” he looked at Thomas Patrick, “he’s gone. Not only publicly, but at home. You know what I mean.”

“How about me at home?” Thomas Patrick raised a pair of haggard blue eyes. “I’m willing to go the limit for him. You can tell him that. But he’s got to go and square things with Mary. He owes me that much.”

“I’ll see he does.”

“And what’s more,” said Thomas Patrick, raising his voice a little, “he’d better come here and see me himself. This isn’t any lawyer’s job, Mr. Marks. It’s between me and him, man to man.”

“So it is, Pat.”

Mr. Marks rose and held out his hand again, but before Thomas Patrick took it he said: “She’s got to know the whole thing. Mary, I mean. You can trust her, and the poor kid’s about crazy by this time.”

“You can trust me,” said Mr. Marks. And then Thomas Patrick shook hands.

He ate something at noon that day, being upheld by that promise, and also by a faint sense of exaltation. If the Chief could trust Mary, and he could trust Marks, then by heaven they could all trust him. Let Stuart do his damnedest. He, Thomas Patrick Finnerty, was on the job.

His faith never wavered until he saw Mary that afternoon, in Stuart’s office. Stuart was at his desk, and Mary was by the window. He saw at once that, although it was a cold day, she was not wearing the fur coat, and she made no move toward him.

Stuart’s presence alarmed him and made him self-conscious, too.

“Hello, honey,” he said.

She looked very white, he saw, and she made no effort to answer him. But her great eyes were fixed on him, staring, as if she were seeing a stranger and endeavouring to fix him in her mind. “Mary, honey!” he said, and took a step toward her, but she neither moved nor spoke.

He looked at Stuart.

“I’d like to see my wife alone,” he said.

“You saw your attorney alone,” Stuart said. “Anybody else is against orders.”

“Has—has anybody been to see you yet, honey?”

“Nobody, except Mrs. Tufts.” There was no life in Mary’s voice. Almost, it seemed, no interest.

Stuart leaned back in his chair and smiled, and suddenly Thomas Patrick saw red. They hadn’t told Mary. They weren’t going to tell Mary. They would let her suffer, while they ran around pulling their dirty little political strings to keep the thing under cover. By God, then he would tell her. Let Stuart hear it if he wanted. He would tell Mary the way they had used him and what they had promised. And he would tell her, convince her, that there was no other woman. There never had been. There couldn’t be.

“Nobody came?” he asked thickly.

“The Chief called up. He said not to worry. He was looking after things.”

The red mist faded. It was Marks who had failed him, not the Chief. The Chief could be trusted.

“I want you to go and see him, honey,” he said, still from that strange distance between them. “He—he wants to see you. Marks said so.”

“I never want to see him again,” Mary replied, monotonously.

“Not if I ask you to, honey?”

Mary’s chin suddenly began to work.

“I loved you so!” she said. “I worked and slaved for you. And all the time you had that girl.”

Thomas Patrick looked at Stuart, and Stuart looked back at him.

“I told you,” he said. “You see how it’s working out, old man.”

Thomas Patrick made a small despairing gesture. “I guess I’d better go back,” he said. He looked at Mary, but she did not look at him. “I never loved anybody but you, honey,” he said. “I guess you’ll never know how much I loved you.”

Then they took him away.

When Mr. Marks, three days later, brought him the news that one Thomas Patrick Finnerty was free to walk the sunny streets again, he found him in the jail infirmary, with a fever.

“It’s all over, Pat,” he said. “You’ve stuck by us, and—”

“You bet I have,” said Thomas Patrick. “And what have I got for it? Three days in hell. You laid down on me, Mr. Marks.”

“If you mean your wife, I saw her yesterday.”

“What did you say?”

“I told her you’d had nothing to do with the shooting.”

“Did you tell her that girl wasn’t mine?”

“That’s what I went to tell her, Pat. But—”

“You didn’t tell her?”

“Look here, Pat,” said Mr. Marks, “you know Mary better than I do. She—well, she’s pretty excitable, and she hates the Chief. If I’d told her that, you know what she’d have done. She’d have beaten it hot-foot down to Stuart, and—I guess you know the rest.”

“My God!” said Thomas Patrick.

He lay back and stared at the ceiling. One wasn’t crucified, then, all at once, one went on, and on, and there wasn’t any end to it. For Marks was right, and Thomas Patrick suddenly knew it. Mary would fight to the death for him, against the Chief, against the world. But maybe he himself—

“I’ve got to get out of here,” he said feverishly. “I can fix her all right. You needn’t worry, Mr. Marks.”

“Sure you can,” said Mr. Marks, heartily. “You’ll be all right in a day or so. And the Chief says anything he can do, just let him know.”

He stayed a little longer, but Thomas Patrick seemed to have nothing to say. He shook hands finally and departed, and as he looked back Thomas Patrick was lying very still, staring at the ceiling.

In a conference with the Chief that night, in the library with the painting, Mr. Marks indicated the situation in a few pointed words.

“I’m warning you,” he said. “He’s all right, but the wife’s a pure hysterical type. She’ll talk, as sure as fate. And he’s hell bent on telling her.”

The Chief was sitting in his chair, his head bent.

“He’s got a right to tell her,” he said heavily.

“I’ve warned you. That’s all I can do.”

“What is it you want, anyhow?” the Chief demanded irritably. “I like the boy. I’m not going to sacrifice him any further than I can help.”

“I’m only talking of the next few weeks.” Mr. Marks’ voice was smooth. “Get her away, keep her away from him until after election. That’s all.” He saw the Chief’s face and smiled. “I’m not talking about abduction, man! Send her for a trip.”

The Chief groaned.

“Or let me do it. You needn’t appear in it at all. She’ll go. She’s pretty sore, you know.”

VIII

Mary had been eating her heart out for a week in Florida, when they finally released Thomas Patrick. He was very weak; he seemed, moving in the crowd, more than ever just a part of it, and even a humbler and more inconspicuous part of it than before. He hurried, as well as he could. Not an extra minute now must be added to Mary’s torture. Because his mind was so eager and his feet so slow, he was slightly bent forward as he moved.

When he found the house locked, and the shutters closed, he was too exhausted for coherent thought. He sat down on the steps and wiped his clammy hands with his handkerchief.

“And I wanted a drink of water,” he muttered to himself. “I wanted a drink of water.”

After a time he got up and moved about the premises, and Mrs. Tufts, seeing him, raised her kitchen window.

“Your key’s here,” she said.

“Where’s Mary?”

“You’re a fine one to be asking that!” she said, and disappeared. When she returned she held out the key, and he took it.

“Has she gone away, Mrs. Tufts?”

“She has that. And right good sense she showed.” Then she slammed down the window.

He felt very weak again, and very thirsty. He unlocked the kitchen and got some water; then he sat down and looked about him. Mary had left him. Mary!

He got up after a while and wandered about the house. Before the self-rocker he stood for some time. “Darned good chair,” he muttered to himself, absently. It would have to be crated to go to Washington. But then they weren’t going to Washington. At last he went upstairs and crawled into bed.

He had a slight return of the fever that night, preceded by a chill, and when he went to a closet for an extra blanket, there was Mary’s fur coat, staring him in the face.

For the first time he broke down. He stood there, in his pajamas an absurd, tragic figure, and cried into it.

The next day he resigned his position. He had thought it all out, and this seemed the only thing to do. But he decided to say nothing about Mary having left him. The Chief might somehow hold it against Mary, and anyhow, he had troubles enough of his own.

“I haven’t any quarrel with anybody, you understand,” he explained painfully. “I guess it was the only way to fix it. But the way I see it, a good many folks know about it, and—” he smiled faintly—“I’d sort of be a liability. Just now, anyhow.”

“I’ll take that risk,” said the Chief grimly. “You did the biggest thing for me one man can do for another. I’m not forgetting that.”

But he made no impression on Thomas Patrick, who remained gently obdurate. He began to wonder if Thomas Patrick suspected the reason for Mary’s absence, and he decided, in that case, to make a clean breast of it. The boy’s face rather alarmed him.

“How’s Mary?” he asked.

Thomas Patrick paled a trifle but his eyes were steady.

“She’s all right,” he said.

“It—didn’t make any difference to her?”

“She understands me, and I understand her,” said Thomas Patrick. “I guess she knows I never cared for anybody else.”

He declined any help in getting another position and went away, leaving the Chief puzzled and baffled. He could not see that what Thomas Patrick had done for him was only honourable by being beyond price, even the price of a job. But he did begin to see, dimly, that one who climbs high may have to do so on the bent shoulders of the defeated.

The next day Thomas Patrick established his vigil. He brought in some groceries and began to keep house, being very careful to wash out the dish cloths and keep everything very tidy, against Mary’s possible return. Now and then he went out, but always he hurried back, for fear he would miss her.

The Tufts would have nothing to do with him, and he was very lonely, so after a while he took to pretending Mary was there. Alone at the table he would sometimes talk to her, and he liked to think that she was just beyond the door, in the kitchen. He would even call to her.

“Honest to God,” Mrs. Tufts said one night, after she had had the dog out, “I think the boy’s daft. He’s sitting in there talking to himself out loud.” And later that night she said to Mr. Tufts: “Maybe we’ve been a bit hard on the lad. I don’t want him on my everlasting soul.”

“Hard on him!” said Mr. Tufts. “If it wasn’t for that boss of his and his dirty political pull he’d be on the end of a rope by now, and you know it.”

As election day drew near however, he was stronger, and he had given up this childish pretence. The sense, too, of her presence in the little house was departing. But he was still waiting. At night, after the Tufts had gone to bed, he would sit out on the front steps and smoke and watch. And sometimes he fell asleep there, to waken stiff and a trifle chilly hours later.

The patrolman on the beat roused him more than once.

One night he wakened himself, and he had a curious feeling that the Chief was very near, looking at him. He started up and looked about. But of course the Chief was not there, and he went inside feeling rather sheepish.

He read the papers carefully, first the personal column, and then the political part, for news of the two people he loved best in all the world. Over one of the Chief’s speeches he pored breathlessly: “This great nation, founded upon an ideal, and that ideal the sanctity of the home—”

“That’s right,” he thought, thrilling a little. “That’s the stuff. The home. That’s—that’s America.”

He went into his deserted house that night, still exalted.

But, more and more, he began to feel that election day was to mark a period of some sort. At first it was vague. If Mary wasn’t back by election day he would do something. He still felt that to do anything before the Chief was elected would amount to desertion. But as time went on the “something” became increasingly definite. And, as election day approached, he began to lay his plans.

He rang the Tufts’ door-bell one night, and Mrs. Tufts opened the door. He looked so thin and worried that her heart was touched.

“Come in,” she said. “Tufts is at the theatre.”

“I guess I’d better not,” he said, uncomfortably. “I have a little package here, for Mary. If she happens to come back any time, and—I’m not around, I wish you’d give it to her.”

“I’ll do it, sure. You’re not going away, are you?”

“No,” he said. “That is, not right away.”

He turned to go, hesitated.

“You might hide it somewhere, if you don’t mind. It’s money.”

Long after he had gone, Mrs. Tufts stood with the package in her hands. It was fairly bulky. She took it upstairs and hid it under a corner of the spare room rug.

It contained, had she known it, the seven hundred dollars from the safe deposit vault.

One day, too, about that time he met Stuart on the street. Thomas Patrick tried to slip by, but Stuart stopped him.

“Understand you’re not working for the Chief any more?”

“I’ve been kind of weak, since that jail fever you fellows gave me!”

“How’s the wife?”

“She’s all right,” said Thomas Patrick, craftily.

Stuart eyed him.

“Most women would have lit out,” he said. “You’re pretty lucky.”

“Yes, I’m pretty lucky,” said Thomas Patrick, and went on.

He bought a revolver that day.

Election day passed very slowly. Once he slipped down town, and looked at the bulletin boards; certain districts he and the Chief had counted on seemed to be wavering, and his face puckered with anxiety. But others, doubtful before, seemed certainties now. When there was cheering he joined in it, and he carried home a newspaper and pored over it.

In the afternoon he cleaned up the yard, and burned the dead leaves. Now and then he stopped and inspected the street. A girl with a suit case sent him dizzy, until he saw it was not Mary. Now and then he looked at his watch.

He ate no supper, and in the evening he went down town again. The Chief was leading now, and the crowds were taking his election for granted. Thomas Patrick sat on a fire plug and watched; he felt lethargic, and very tired, like a runner who has won the goal and is too weary for triumph.

Home once more, he made the round of the house. It was all in order. He got out the revolver and loaded it. Then an odor of burning leaves coming through the window attracted his attention, and he went downstairs and filling a pail with water, carried it out and extinguished the smoulder.

He did not go in at once. He knew now that Mary was not coming back, but he had agreed to give her to election day, and the day was not over. After a time he dozed, to be wakened at midnight by the touch of the patrolman’s hand on his arm. He roused and smiled.

“All right, Sweeney,” he said. “Kinda cold to-night, isn’t it?”

Then he looked again. It was the Chief, and beside him was Mary.

Half an hour later the Chief went away. Thomas Patrick took him to the door, and helped him into his overcoat, as he had done so often before.

“It was awfully good of you to come, sir,” he said. “I—I appreciate it.”

The Chief looked down at him grimly.

“Is that all you’ve got to say, Pat?”

Thomas Patrick reflected. What had he forgotten?

“Oh, I’m sorry!” he said. “I guess I’ve been pretty much excited. My congratulations, Senator.”

The new Senator pulled his hat over his eyes, and opened the front door. “Thanks,” he said, and his voice was slightly hoarse. He went out on the doorstep, the odor of wet, smouldering wood was still thick in the air—and hesitated there.

“But you won’t come to Washington?”

Thomas Patrick lowered his voice.

“Well, you heard what she said. She doesn’t want to go,” he said apologetically. “She seems to think—well she’s been kind of worried. And she likes this house.”

The Chief drove away. He had left the old life behind him, with its weaknesses, and to-morrow was a new day. But he had also left behind him Thomas Patrick, and the new day seemed strangely empty.

As the car turned a corner he glanced back. Thomas Patrick was still on his step, staring after him. . . .

After a time Thomas Patrick went inside and closed the door. In the hall he coughed, to clear a tension in his throat, and then he went back to where Mary awaited him in the parlour, a loving, penitent Mary, but still with that look of fear in her eyes.

“Are you going with him?” she asked.

“No, honey. I told him.”

Mary came to him, and put her arms around him.

“You’ll not be sorry, Pat,” she whispered. “I’ll make it up to you. We’ll just be happy, and forget him.”

“Yes,” said Thomas Patrick sturdily. “We’ll just be happy.”

He took Mary around, and showed her the dish cloths, and the inside of the coffee pot! He even made her some coffee, and stood over her in the dining room while she drank it.

“How are the Tufts?” she inquired.

“They’re fine,” he said cheerfully.

And it was as if, in re-discovering Mary, he had rediscovered the little house, too.

“Didn’t make any mistake in this dining room furniture, did we?” he asked.

“I got sort of homesick to see it again, Pat.”

“Did you, honey?”

But long after Mary was apparently asleep that night he lay there in the darkness, staring at the ceiling. Well, a man couldn’t have everything. He had Mary. He put his arm over her, and she moved and spoke.

“Pat,” she said, “what was the revolver doing in the spare room?”

He hesitated. Then he told her his third and last lie.

“Oh, that!” he said. “It belongs to the Chief. I’ll take it down to him to-morrow.”

Some months later Thomas Patrick Finnerty got out of the train, and took his first view of the nation’s capital. He had sat up all night in the day coach of the excursion train—“See Washington. Round trip five dollars”—but in the washroom he had changed his collar, and he was now prepared to face the day.

The dome on Capitol Hill towered before him. He knew it at once, and directed his steps toward it. He was too excited to eat. He was going to see the Chief again; hear him, too. For to-day the Chief was to deliver his first speech in the Senate.

It was still early. He wandered about, closely inspecting the Grant monument so as to be able to describe it to Mary later, and so when the doors finally opened he was the first in the visitors’ gallery. He sat in the front row, inspecting each senator as he went to his desk, until the Chief came in. After that he saw nobody else.

Men came in and went out. The galleries slowly filled. Bored reporters wandered into the press gallery, glanced down, yawned, and went out again. The Chief sat shuffling papers on his desk. After awhile he rose to his feet. Thomas Patrick’s collar felt suddenly very tight; he ran his finger around inside it to loosen it.

It was not a great speech, as such things go, but to Thomas Patrick it was surpassing.

“He’s got Henry Clay and Daniel Webster beat a mile,” he muttered. “Those old birds, they couldn’t touch him.”

He did not understand why the Senate did not rise in acclaim when the Chief sat down. He resented the indifference of the Vice-President on his rostrum, and the lethargy of the galleries. He was so excited that he had to wipe his clammy hands with his handkerchief.

When the Senate recessed he went down the staircase into the rotunda and waited there. Now and then he glanced at its hideous statues, but only for a second. He did not want to miss the Chief. In the centre there had once lain the body of the unknown soldier, and all the nations of the world had brought wreaths and placed them against the bier. Some poor kid, sacrificed that government might live.

It never occurred to him that there was a certain analogy there. He blinked a little as he stared up into the dizzy height of the dome.

Then he heard the Chief’s voice. His heart raced; he stepped forward, a small nervous figure, just like any other of the tourists who wandered about, only perhaps a trifle more humble, a size smaller than most of them. So humble, so small and inconspicuous was he that the Chief never saw him. He passed between two other great men, and went on.

Late that night Thomas Patrick sat in the day coach again. He was making notes of what he had seen, to take them back to Mary: The Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Over this last entry his head drooped. He was very tired.

He leaned back against the back of the seat and thought things over, but mainly he thought of the Chief and of the speech he had made that day.

“The country’s safe with him,” he reflected. “He’s a great man. Any way you look at it, he’s a great man.”