me?" said George, who saw one traveling
lonesomely along the nearby road.

"Why, of course," she said, "you know that dogs go home."

"Do the gnats?" he persisted, seeing one of those curious spirals
of minute insects turning energetically in the waning light.

"Yes," she said, half believing her remark. "Listen!"

"Oho," exclaimed George, incredulously, "I wonder what kind of
houses they live in."

"Listen!" she gently persisted, putting out her hand to still
him.

It was that halcyon hour when the Angelus falls like a benediction
upon the waning day. Far off the notes were sounding gently, and
nature, now that she listened, seemed to have paused also. A
scarlet-breasted robin was hopping in short spaces upon the grass
before her. A humming bee hummed, a cow-bell tinkled, while some
suspicious cracklings told of a secretly reconnoitering squirrel.
Keeping her pretty hand weighed in the air, she listened until the
long, soft notes spread and faded and her heart could hold no more.
Then she arose.

"Oh," she said, clenching her fingers in an agony of poetic
feeling. There were crystal tears overflowing in her eyes. The
wondrous sea of feeling in her had stormed its banks. Of such was the
spirit of Jennie.

CHAPTER III

The junior Senator, George Sylvester Brander, was a man of peculiar
mold. In him there were joined, to a remarkable degree, the wisdom of
the opportunist and the sympathetic nature of the true representative
of the people. Born a native of southern Ohio, he had been raised and
educated there, if one might except the two years in which he had
studied law at Columbia University. He knew common and criminal law,
perhaps, as well as any citizen of his State, but he had never
practised with that assiduity which makes for pre-eminent success at
the bar. He had made money, and had had splendid opportunities to make
a great deal more if he had been willing to stultify his conscience,
but that he had never been able to do. And yet his integrity had not
been at all times proof against the claims of friendship. Only in the
last presidential election he had thrown his support to a man for
Governor who, he well knew, had no claim which a strictly honorable
conscience could have recognized.

In the same way, he had been guilty of some very questionable, and
one or two actually unsavory, appointments. Whenever his conscience
pricked him too keenly he would endeavor to hearten himself with his
pet p