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“I suppose you think it rather shocking to hear a woman talking practically of such common-place things,” she said at last, in a cold voice, just loud enough to be heard.

“No ma’am,” he said huskily.

“Then what do you think?” she cried, turning toward him again with a quick imperious gesture.

“I think I’d better go back to Stackpole,” he answered very slowly, “and resign my job. I don’t see as I’ve got any business in the Legislature.”

“I don’t understand you.”

He shook his head mournfully. “It’s a simple enough matter. I’ve studied out a good many bills and talked ’em over and I’ve picked up some influence and–“

“I know you have.” she interrupted eagerly. “Mr. Truslow says that the members of your drains and dikes committee follow your vote on every bill.”

“Yes ma’am,” said Alonzo Rawson meekly, “but I expect they oughtn’t to. I’ve had a lesson this afternoon.”

“You mean to say–“

“I mean that I didn’t know what I was doing about that baseball bill. I was just pig-headedly goin’ ahead against it, not knowing nothing about the conditions, and it took a lady to show me what they were. I would have done a wrong thing if you hadn’t stopped me.”

“You mean,” she cried, her splendid eyes widening with excitement and delight; “you mean that you—that you–“

“I mean that I will vote for the bill!” He struck his clenched fist upon his knee. “I come to the Legislature to do right!”

“You will, ah, you will do right in this!” Mrs. Protheroe thrust up her veil again and her face was flushed and radiant with triumph. “And you’ll work, and you’ll make a speech for the bill?”

At this the righteous exaltation began rather abruptly to simmer down in the soul of Alonzo Rawson. He saw the consequences of too violently reversing, and knew how difficult they might be to face.

“Well, not–not exactly,” he said weakly. “I expect our best plan would be for me to lay kind of low and not say any more about the bill at all. Of course, I’ll quit workin’ against it; and on the roll-call I’ll edge up close to the clerk and say ‘Aye’ so that only him’ll hear me. That’s done every day–and I–well, I don’t just exactly like to come out too publicly for it, after my speech and all I’ve done against it.”

She looked at him sharply for a short second, and then offered him her hand and said: “Let’s shake hands now, on the vote. Think what a triumph it is for me to know that I helped to show you the right.”

“Yes ma’am,” he answered confusedly, too much occupied with shaking her hand to know what he said. She spoke one word in an undertone to the driver and the machine took the very shortest way back to the city.

After this excursion, several days passed, before Mrs. Protheroe came to the State house again. Rawson was bending over the desk of Senator Josephus Battle, the white-bearded leader of the opposition to the “Sunday Baseball Bill,” and was explaining to him the intricacies of a certain drainage measure, when Battle, whose attention had wandered, plucked his sleeve and whispered:

“If you want to see a mighty pretty woman that’s doin’ no good here, look behind you, over there in the chair by the big fireplace at the back of the room.”

Alonzo looked.

It was she whose counterpart had been in his dream’s eye every moment of the dragging days which had been vacant of her living presence. A number of his colleagues were hanging over her almost idiotically; her face was gay and her voice came to his ears, as he turned, with the accent of her cadenced laughter running through her talk like a chime of tiny bells flitting through a strain of music.

“This is the third time she’s been here,” said Battle, rubbing his beard the wrong way. “She’s lobbyin’ for that infernal Sabbath- Desecration bill, but we’ll beat her, my son.”