certain finesse, he said:--

"There's a man out this way I must look up--a kind of farmer, drover,
and jockey rolled in one. He influences a bunch of votes. It's very
pleasant to find you riding the same way. I'm glad we met--that is--if
you--"

Her smile stopped his limping improvisation in mid-career.

"You needn't invent anything more," she said. "You're not good at it."

"There really is such a man," he defended, with a contented laugh; "but
he can wait. I'd like to be quit of the political grind for a while.
May I rest?"

"Yes; you may come," Ruth decided.

His appeal struck a womanly chord.

October was spendthrift of its pigments. Every isolated copse was a
mimic forest fire, each bivouacked corn-field a russet foil, the air a
heady wine. Shelby thrilled with dumb pastorals and a vague longing to
do and speak in keeping with the spirit of the scene. A tuft of oxeye
daisies in the shelter of a ruinous worm fence attracted him, and he
reined the cob from the highway to fetch them. To his bewilderment
Ruth's face shadowed at the gift.

"Poor things--what made you?" she lamented. "I've watched them there
for a fortnight. What clumsy florist could have grouped them with the
tall grasses so exquisitely, and set the little red vine clambering
over all in the fence corner, so satiny and lichen-gray?"

Shelby was mystified.

"I thought that they would look smart in your belt--that all women
wanted to pick flowers when they saw them--" he stammered. "I'm afraid
I know little of women's ways."

Her laugh was a caress.

"Don't put my rudeness upon the sex," she said. "It's because I dabble
in paints and things that I thought of these flowers first as a
picture. But I assure you I'm just as much given to plundering them to
set off my hair and dress as any daughter of Eve," wherewith she placed
his offering, as he would have it, in her belt. He seemed to her
always a kind of shorn Samson when afield from politics, and now, as
she had often done, she drew him to speak of what he knew best.

"I used to think you cared little about such things," he told her
presently. "The average woman doesn't care greatly. If she had the
ballot, she'd probably vote for the handsomest man--if the candidate
was a man."

"I'm afraid I should," owned Ruth. "For instance, I never could vote
for a candidate with mutton-chop whiskers. And fancy having to decide
between two women!"

"Vote-buying would have a scop