293

XXIII. A CRY IN THE NIGHT 302

XXIV. FIELD HEADQUARTERS 320

XXV. BLOOD AND IRON 327

XXVI. APPLES OF GOLD 343

XXVII. IN WHICH PATRICIA DRIVES 356

XXVIII. THE GOSSIPING WIRES 367

XXIX. AT SHONOHO INN 379

XXX. THE RECKONING 390

XXXI. _A LA BONNE HEURE_ 407

THE HONORABLE SENATOR SAGE-BRUSH

I

BECAUSE PATRICIA SAID "NO"

Some one was giving a dinner dance at the country club, and Blount, who
was a week-end guest of the Beverleys, was ill-natured enough to be
resentful. What right had a gay and frivolous world to come and thrust
its light-hearted happiness upon him when Patricia had said "No"? It was
like bullying a cripple, he told himself morosely, and when he had read
the single telegram which had come while he was at dinner he begged Mrs.
Beverley's indulgence and went out to find a chair in a corner of the
veranda where the frivolities had not as yet intruded.

It was a North Shore night like that in which Shakespeare has mingled
moon-shadows with the gossamer fantasies of the immortal "Dream." Though
the dance was in-doors, the trees on the lawn and the road-fronting
verandas of the club-house were hung with festoons of Chinese lanterns.
At the carriage-entrance smart automobiles were coming and going, and
one of them, with the dust of the Boston parkways on its running-gear,
brought the guests of honor--three daughters of a Western senator lately
home from their summer abroad.

Blount knew neither the honorers nor the honored ones, and had
resolutely refused the chance offered him by Mrs. Beverley to amend his
ignorance. For Patricia's "No" was not yet twenty-four hours old, and
since it had changed the stars in their courses for Patricia's lover,
the cataclysm was much too recent to postulate anything like a return of
the heavenly bodies to their normal orbits.

Not that Blount put it that way, either to Mrs. Beverley or to himself.
He was a level-eyed, square-shouldered young man of an up-to-date world,
and the stock from which he sprang was prosaic and practical rather than
poetic or sentimental. But the fact remained, and when he sat back in
his corner absently folding the lately received telegram into a narrow
spill and scowling moodily down upon the coming and going procession of
motor