fted to its chosen hanging
place.

Seated in his armchair, Gard with mixed emotions watched it elevated and
straightened. The pictured face smiled down at him--impersonal yet
human, glowing, vivid with color, alive with that suggestion of eternal
life that art alone in its highest expression can give. Card's smile was
enigmatical; his eyes were sad. His imagination pictured to him Mrs.
Marteen as she had sat before him in her self-contained stateliness and
announced with indifferent calm that the Vandyke had been but a ruse to
gain his private ear.

Gard rose, approached the picture, and for an instant laid his fingers
upon its darkened frame. The movement was that of a worshiper who makes
his vow at the touch of some relic infinitely holy.

Then he returned to his seat and for some time remained wrapped in
thought. These moments of introspection, of deep self-questioning, had
become more and more frequent. He had made in the past few months a new
and most interesting acquaintance--himself. All the years of his
over-hurried, over-cultivated, ambitious life he had delved into the
psychology of others. It had been his pride to divine motives, to
dissect personalities, to classify and sort the brains and natures of
men. Now for the first time he had turned the scalpel upon himself. He
was amazed, he was shocked, almost frightened. He could not hide from
himself, he was no longer blind, the searchlight of his own analysis was
inexorably focused on his own sins and shortcomings--his powers misused,
his strength misdirected, his weaknesses indulged, because his strength
protected them. In these hours of what he had grown to grimly call his
"stock taking," he had become aware of a new and all-important group of
men. Where before he had reckoned values solely by capacities of brain
and hand, he found now a new factor--the capacity of heart. Ideals that
heretofore had borne to his mind the stamp of weakness, now showed
themselves as real bulwarks of character. The men who had fallen by the
wayside in the advance of his pitiless march to power, were no longer,
to his eyes, types of the unfit, to be thrust aside. Some were men,
indeed, who knew their own souls, and would not barter them.

In his mind a vast readjustment had taken place. Words had become
bodied, the unseen was becoming the visible--Responsibility, Honesty,
Fairness, Truth! they had all been words to conjure with--for use in
political speeches, in interviews--be