ess, and from
time to time was retained by large business interests because of his
persuasive gifts with committees of the legislature--though these had
been powerless to avert the recent calamity of the women and children's
fifty-four hour bill. Mr. Sprole's hair was prematurely white, and the
crow's-feet at the corners of his eyes were not the result of legal
worries.

"Hullo, Dit," he said jovially.

"Hullo, Ches," said Ditmar.

"Now you're the very chap I wanted to see. Where have you been keeping
yourself lately? Come out to the farm to-night,--same of the boys'll be
there." Mr. Sprole, like many a self-made man, was proud of his farm,
though he did not lead a wholly bucolic existence.

"I can't, Ches," answered Ditmar. "I've got to go back to Hampton."

This statement Mr. Sprole unwisely accepted as a fiction. He took hold of
Ditmar's arm.

"A lady--eh--what?"

"I've got to go back to Hampton," repeated Ditmar, with a suggestion of
truculence that took his friend aback. Not for worlds would Mr. Sprole
have offended the agent of the Chippering Mill.

"I was only joking, Claude," he hastened to explain. Ditmar, somewhat
mollified but still dejected, sought the dining-room when the lawyer had
gone.

"All alone to-night, Colonel?" asked the coloured head waiter,
obsequiously.

Ditmar demanded a table in the corner, and consumed a solitary meal.

Very naturally Janet was aware of the change in Ditmar, and knew the
cause of it. Her feelings were complicated. He, the most important man in
Hampton, the self-sufficient, the powerful, the hitherto distant and
unattainable head of the vast organization known as the Chippering Mill,
of which she was an insignificant unit, at times became for her just a
man--a man for whom she had achieved a delicious contempt. And the
knowledge that she, if she chose, could sway and dominate him by the mere
exercise of that strange feminine force within her was intoxicating and
terrifying. She read this in a thousand signs; in his glances; in his
movements revealing a desire to touch her; in little things he said,
apparently insignificant, yet fraught with meaning; in a constant
recurrence of the apologetic attitude--so alien to the Ditmar formerly
conceived--of which he had given evidence that day by the canal: and from
this attitude emanated, paradoxically, a virile and galvanic current
profoundly disturbing. Sometimes when he bent over her she experienced a
commingled ecstas