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In the meantime here was Anne, reading Dickens, eating chocolates, and leaning over the rail of the House Gallery to listen to his speeches.

It was rather wonderful to have her there. She wore a gray cape with a chinchilla collar made out of Amy’s old muff. A straight sailor hat of rough straw came well down over her forehead and showed fluffs of shining hair at the sides. Her little gray-gloved hands clasped the violets he had given her. Above the violets her eyes were a deeper blue.

She came always alone. “Amy doesn’t know,” she had told him frankly; “she wouldn’t let me, come if she did.”

“Why not?”

“I am supposed to be chaperoned.”

“My dear child, I told you to bring either or both of your sisters.”

“I don’t want them. They would spoil it.”

“How?”

She tried to explain. He and she could see things in the old Capitol that Amy and Ethel couldn’t.

He laughed, but knew it true. Anne’s imagination met his in a rather remarkable fashion. When they walked through Statuary Hall they saw not Fulton and Pere Marquette and Carroll of Carrollton; they saw, rather, a thousand ships issuing forth on the steam of a teakettle; they saw civilization following a black-frocked prophet; they saw aristocracy raising its voice in the interest of democracy.

As for the mysterious whispering echo, they repudiated all talk of acoustics. It was for them an eerie thing, like the laughter of elves or the shriek of a banshee.

“Don’t say every-day things to me,” Anne had instructed Maxwell when he had first placed her behind a mottled marble pillar before leaving for the spot where he could speak to her by this unique wireless.

There came to her, therefore, a part of a famous speech; the murmured words flung back by that strange sounding board rang like a bell:

“Give me liberty or give me death!”

She emerged from her corner, starry-eyed. “It was as if I heard him say it.”

“Perhaps it was he, and I was only a mouthpiece.”

“I should think they’d like to come back. Will you come?”

He laughed. “Who knows? I’ll come if you are here.”

To have brought a third into these adventures would have robbed them of charm. Knowing this he argued that the child was safe with him. Why worry?

They always lunched together before he took her up to the Members’ Gallery, and went himself to the floor of the House. He let her order what she pleased and liked The definite way in which she did it. They had usually, chops and peas, or steak, and ice-cream at the end.

III

Then suddenly; things stopped. The reason that they stopped was Murray. He saw Anne one day in the House Gallery and asked Amy about it.

“How did she happen to be up there alone?”

Amy asked Anne. Anne told the truth.

“I’ve had lunch three times with Mr. Sears, and I’ve listened to his speeches. It’s something about the League of Nations. He believes in it, but thinks we’ve got to be careful about tying ourselves up.”

Amy did not care in the least what Maxwell Sears believed. The thing that worried her was Murray. She wanted him to approve of Anne. If Amy had thought in a less limited circle she might have worked the thing out that if Maxwell married Anne it would narrow Murray’s choice down to herself and Ethel. But there was always that vague fear of some outside siren who would capture Murray. If he had Anne, he would then be safely in the family.

She realized, in the days following the revelation of the clandestine meetings with Maxwell, that Murray was depending upon her to see that Anne’s affections did not stray into forbidden paths. He said as much one afternoon when he found Amy alone in an atmosphere of old portraits, old books, old bronzes. She sat in a Jacobean chair and poured tea for him. The massive lines of the chair made her proportions seem wraithlike. Her white face with its fixed spots of red was a high light among the shadows.