woman should not--if Joe--!
He clipped the revery of its conclusion.

In that evening's long intimacy--how long or how intimate neither
realized till afterward--the man bared his financial necessity.

"God knows why I blab this," he ended. "I've told nobody else the whole
truth, not even Bowers."

She lagged short of his meaning at first.

"But you'll have plenty in time," she said. "There will be your
congressional salary and all the new opportunities."

"Without money I may never draw that salary."

"You don't mean you'll fail! You don't mean that, Ross?"

He bowed gravely.

"But it's impossible. Why, everybody will vote for you--almost
everybody. Joe alone will give you two hundred votes."

"It will require more than Little Poland's good-will to elect me," he
smiled grimly.

"You must _buy_ votes?"

"Yes."

"And you have nothing?"

"At this moment I haven't enough ready cash to give me a decent burial."

"Don't speak like that." She rose impulsively, and unlocked a cabinet in
the chimneypiece. "Here is a little--not much--a hundred dollars
perhaps. I want you to take it; it's mine--some of my allowance. I want
to give it to the party. And there's more. I've a mortgage--my very
own. You shall have that too--for the party."

Shelby leaped to his feet as she thrust the bills in his hands.

"My God, Cora," he cried, "I can't take this--your pin money!"

She caught the notes from his protesting fingers and forced them into his
nearest pocket.

"You shall," she pleaded; "you shall--for the party."

He seized her hands and bent to meet her eyes.

"Cora, Cora," he whispered hoarsely, "you're not doing this for the
party! It's not for the party! It's for me, Cora, for me--"

"Such a nice party--party--" A fragment of Milicent's treble good nights
drifted in from the sidewalk like an echo.

CHAPTER VI

Shelby waked from a restless night to confront a restless day, in
truth, an anxious week. Two things he set about instanter; he wrote a
manly letter of apology to Ruth, and he returned Mrs. Hilliard's money.
All day long he parried and laughed down fatuous comment on his
supposed cropper into the canal, for the cob had returned to his manger
and founded a theory that his master let gossip accept as true. He
dissembled with greater ease as the hours lapsed, finding reasons why
the inner history of the incident would remain secret; neither Ruth nor
Bernard Graves was likely to