ng
that, there, the human will had been pushed to its farthest limits of
endurance.

Seeing it for the first time, Courtier said:

"Fine thing--that! Only wants a soul."

Miltoun nodded:

"Sit down," he said.

Courtier sat down.

There followed one of those silences in which men whose spirits, though
different, have a certain bigness in common--can say so much to one
another:

At last Miltoun spoke:

"I have been living in the clouds, it seems. You are her oldest friend.
The immediate question is how to make it easiest for her in face of this
miserable rumour!"

Not even Courtier himself could have put such whip-lash sting into the
word 'miserable.'

He answered:

"Oh! take no notice of that. Let them stew in their own juice. She won't
care."

Miltoun listened, not moving a muscle of his face.

"Your friends here," went on Courtier with a touch of contempt, "seem in
a flutter. Don't let them do anything, don't let them say a word. Treat
the thing as it deserves to be treated. It'll die."

Miltoun, however, smiled.

"I'm not sure," he said, "that the consequences will be as you think,
but I shall do as you say."

"As for your candidature, any man with a spark of generosity in his soul
will rally to you because of it."

"Possibly," said Miltoun. "It will lose me the election, for all that."

Then, dimly conscious that their last words had revealed the difference
of their temperaments and creeds, they stared at one another.

"No," said Courtier, "I never will believe that people can be so mean!"

"Until they are."

"Anyway, though we get at it in different ways, we agree."

Miltoun leaned his elbow on the mantelpiece, and shading his face with
his hand, said:

"You know her story. Is there any way out of that, for her?"

On Courtier's face was the look which so often came when he was speaking
for one of his lost causes--as if the fumes from a fire in his heart had
mounted to his head.

"Only the way," he answered calmly, "that I should take if I were you."

"And that?"

"The law into your own hands."

Miltoun unshaded his face. His gaze seemed to have to travel from an
immense distance before it reached Courtier. He answered:

"Yes, I thought you would say that."

CHAPTER XVII

When everything, that night, was quiet, Barbara, her hair hanging loose
outside her dressing gown, slipped from her room into the dim corridor.
With bare feet thrust into fur-crowned slippers which m