tty fair garden of Eden--serpents and apple-trees being
excluded."

They were happy. Even when disappointments befell them and prospects were
unpromising they were happy. They could look into each other's eyes and
take comfort. Rupert's dark moods had melted away. He sometimes forgot
they had ever ruled him. His old boyish craving for love and home was
fed. The bare little rooms in the poor little house were home. Sheba and
Tom were love and affection. When they sat at the table and calculated
how much longer their diminishing store would last, even as it grew
smaller and smaller, they could laugh over the sums they worked out on
slips of paper. So long as the weather was warm enough they strolled
about together in the fragrant darkness or sat in the creeper-hung porch,
in the light of summer moons; when the cold nights came they sat about
the stove or the table and talked, while Sheba sewed buttons on or worked
assiduously at the repairing of her small wardrobe. Whatsoever she did,
the two men sat and admired, and there was love and laughter.

The strenuous life which went on in the busier part of the town--the
politics, the struggles, the plots and schemes, the worldly
pleasures--seemed entirely apart from them.

Sometimes, after a day in which Judge Rutherford had been encouraged or
Tom had had a talk with a friendly member who had listened to the story
of the claim with signs of interest, they felt their star of hope rising;
it never sinks far below the horizon when one's teens are scarcely of the
past--and Sheba and Rupert spent a wonderful evening making plans for a
future of ease and fortune.

At Judge Rutherford's suggestion, Tom had long sought an interview with a
certain member of the Senate whose good word would be a carrying weight
in any question under debate. He was a shrewd, honest, business-like man,
and a personal friend of the President's. He was much pursued by honest
and dishonest alike, and, as a result of experience, had become difficult
to reach. On the day Tom was admitted to see him, he had been more than
usually badgered. Just as Tom approached his door a little man opened it
cautiously and slid out, with the air of one leaving within the apartment
things not exhilarating on retrospect. He was an undersized country man,
the cut of whose jeans wore a familiar air to Tom's eye even at a
distance and before he lifted the countenance which revealed him as Mr.
Stamps.

"We ain't a-gwine to do y