to have a wife when he is the judge. How long will it be before he can be
the governor, dear?"

"That depends on the wife, Mrs. Buchanan, to a large extent," answered
the major with a delighted smile.

"Oh, Phoebe will want him to do things," said Mrs. Matilda positively.

"No doubt of that," the major replied. "I see David Kildare slated for
the full life from now on--eh, Caroline?"

And the major had judged Phoebe's situation perhaps more rightly than he
realized, for while David led the vote-directors' rally at the theater
and later was closeted with Andrew for hours over the last editorial
appeal in the morning _Journal_, Phoebe sat before her desk in her own
little down-town home. Mammy Kitty was snoring away like a peaceful
watch-dog on her cot in the dressing-room and the whole apartment was
dark save for the shaded desk-light.

The time and place were fitting and Phoebe was summoning her visions--and
facing her realities. Down the years came sauntering the nonchalant
figure of David Kildare. He had asked her to marry him that awful,
lonely, sixteenth birthday and he had asked her the same thing every
year of all the succeeding ten--and a number of times in between. Phoebe
squared herself to her reviewing self and admitted that she had cared for
him then and ever since--_cared_ for him, but had starved his tenderness
and in the lover had left unsought the man. But she was clear-sighted
enough to know that the handsome easy-going boy, who had wooed with a
smile and taken rebuff with a laugh, was not the steady-eyed forceful man
who now faced her. He stood at the door of a life that stretched away