leading them away to where a patch of hickory-trees flourished, because there were open fields, with shade for comfort and a brook of living water. No artist in the formulating of conceptions, her soul still responded to these things, and every sound and every sigh were welcome to her because of their beauty.
When the soft, low call of the wood-doves, those spirits of the summer, came out of the distance, she would incline her head and listen, the whole spiritual quality of it dropping like silver bubbles into her own great heart.
Where the sunlight was warm and the shadows flecked with its splendid radiance she delighted to wonder at the pattern of it, to walk where it was most golden, and follow with instinctive appreciation the holy corridors of the trees.
Colour was not lost upon her. That wonderful radiance which fills the western sky at evening touched and unburdened her heart.
“I wonder,” she said once with girlish simplicity, “how it would feel to float away off there among those clouds.”
She had discovered a natural swing of a wild grape-vine, and was sitting in it with Martha and George.
“Oh, wouldn’t it be nice if you had a boat up there,” said George.
She was looking with uplifted face at a far-off cloud, a red island in a sea of silver.
“Just supposing,” she said, “people could live on an island like that.”
Her soul was already up there, and its elysian paths knew the lightness of her feet.
“There goes a bee,” said George, noting a bumbler winging by.
“Yes,” she said, dreamily, “it’s going home.”
“Does everything have a home?” asked Martha.
“Nearly everything,” she answered.
“Do the birds go home?” questioned George.
“Yes,” she said, deeply feeling the poetry of it herself, “the birds go home.”
“Do the bees go home?” urged Martha.
“Yes, the bees go home.”
“Do the dogs go home?” said George, who saw one travelling lonesomely along the nearby road.
“Why, of course,” she said, “you know that dogs go home.”
“Do the gnats?” he persisted, seeing one of those curious spirals of minute insects turning energetically in the waning light.
“Yes,” she said, half believing her remark. “Listen!”
“Oho,” exclaimed George, incredulously, “I wonder what kind of houses they live in.”
“Listen!” she persisted, putting out her hand to still him.
It was that halcyon hour when the Angelus falls like a benediction upon the waning day. Far off the notes were sounding gently, and nature, now that she listened, seemed to have paused also. A scarlet-breasted robin was hopping in short spaces upon the grass before her. A humming bee hummed, a cow-bell tinkled, while some suspicious cracklings told of a secretly reconnoitering squirrel. Keeping her pretty hand weighed in the air, she listened until the long, soft notes spread and faded and her heart could hold no more. Then she arose.
“Oh,” she said, clenching her fingers in an agony of poetic feeling. There were crystal tears overflowing in her eyes. The wondrous sea of feeling in her had stormed its banks. Of such was the spirit of Jennie.
Chapter III
The junior Senator, George Sylvester Brander, was a man of peculiar mould. In him there were joined, to a remarkable degree, the wisdom of the opportunist and the sympathetic nature of the true representative of the people. Born a native of southern Ohio, he had been raised and educated there, if one might except the two years in which he had studied law at Columbia University. He knew common and criminal law, perhaps, as well as any citizen of his State, but he had never practised with that assiduity which makes for pre-eminent success at the bar. He had made money, and had had splendid opportunities to make a great deal more if he had been willing to stultify his conscience, but that he had never been able to do. And yet his integrity had not been at all times proof against the claims of friendship. Only in the last presidential election he had thrown his support to a man for Governor who, he well knew, had no claim which strictly honourable conscience could have recognised.
In the same way, he had been guilty of some very questionable, and one or two actually unsavory, appointments. Whenever his conscience pricked him too keenly he would endeavour to hearten himself with his pet phrase, “All in a lifetime.” Thinking over things quite alone in his easy-chair, he would sometimes rise up with these words on his lips, and smile sheepishly as he did so. Conscience was not by any means dead in him. His sympathies, if anything, were keener than ever.
This man, three times Congressman from the district of which Columbus was a part, and twice United States Senator, had never married. In his youth he had had a serious love affair, but there was nothing discreditable to him in the fact that it came to nothing. The lady found it inconvenient to wait for him. He was too long in earning a competence upon which they might subsist.
Tall, straight-shouldered, neither lean nor stout, he was today an imposing figure. Having received his hard knocks and endured his losses, there was that about him which touched and awakened the sympathies of the imaginative. People thought him naturally agreeable, and his senatorial peers looked upon him as not any too heavy mentally, but personally a fine man.
His presence in Columbus at this particular time was due to the fact that his political fences needed careful repairing. The general election had weakened his party in the State Legislature. There were enough votes to re-elect him, but it would require the most careful political manipulation to hold them together. Other men were ambitious. There were a half-dozen available candidates, any one of whom would have rejoiced to step into his shoes. He realised the exigencies of the occasion. They could not well beat him, he thought; but even if this should happen, surely the President could be induced to give him a ministry abroad.
Yes, he might be called a successful man, but for all that Senator Brander felt that he had missed something. He had wanted to do so many things. Here he was, fifty-two years of age, clean, honourable, highly distinguished, as the world takes it, but single. He could not help looking about him now and then and speculating upon the fact that he had no one to care for him. His chamber seemed strangely hollow at times — his own personality exceedingly disagreeable.
“Fifty!” he often thought to himself. “Alone — absolutely alone.”
Sitting in his chamber that Saturday afternoon, a rap at his door aroused him. He had been speculating upon the futility of his political energy in the light of the impermanence of life and fame.
“What a great fight we make to sustain ourselves?” he thought. “How little difference it will make to me a few years hence?”
He arose, and opening wide his door, perceived Jennie. She had come, as she had suggested to her mother, at this time, instead of on Monday, in order to give
