till her eyes were full of tears, and her tangled hair fell all about her red cheeks.  She could not help but do it, he believed, for at other times she was shy, terrified, if one spoke to her; but he wished he had not seen her dance then, though she was only a child:  dancing, he thought, was as foul and effective a snare as ever came from hell.  After that day she used often to come to the farm to see his mother and Sarah.  They tried to teach her to sew, but she was a lazy little thing, he remembered, with an indulgent smile.  And he was “Uncle Dan.”  So now she was grown up, quite a woman:  in those years, when she had been with her kinsfolk in New York, she had been taught to sing.  Well, well!  McKinstry reckoned music as about as useful as the crackling of thorns under a pot; so he never cared to know, what was the fact, that this youngest daughter of Gurney’s had one of the purest contralto voices in the States.  She came home, grown, but just as shy; only tired, needing care:  no one could look in Lizzy Gurney’s face without wishing to comfort and help the child.  The Gurneys were so wretchedly poor, that might be the cause of her look.  She was a woman now.  Well, and then?  Why, nothing then.  He was Uncle Dan still, of whom she was less afraid than of any other living creature; that was all.  Thinking, as he stood with Paul Blecker, leaning over the gate, of how she had brought him a badly-made havelock that morning.  “You’re always so kind to me,” she said.  “So I am kind to her,” he thought, his quiet blue eyes growing duller behind their spectacles; “so I will be.”

The Doctor opened the gate, and went in, turning into the shrubbery, and seating himself under a sycamore.

“Don’t wait for me, McKinstry,” he said.  “I’ll sit here and smoke a bit.  Here comes the aforesaid Joseph.”

He did not light his cigar, however, when the other left him; took off his hat to let the wind blow through his hair, the petulant heat dying out of his face, giving place to a rigid settling, at last, of the fickle features.

A flabby, red-faced man in fine broadcloth and jaunty beaver came down the path, fumbling his seals, and met the Captain with a puffing snort of salutation.  To Blecker, whose fancy was made sultry to-night by some passion we know nothing of, he looked like a bloated spider coming out of the cell where his victims were.  “Gorging himself, while they and the country suffer the loss,” he muttered.  But Paul was a hot-brained young man.  We should only have seen a vulgar, commonplace trickster in politics, such as the people make pets of.  “Such men as Schuyler Gurney get the fattest offices.  God send us a monarchy soon!” he hissed under his breath, as the gate closed after the politician.  By which you will perceive that Dr. Blecker, like most men fighting their way up, was too near-sighted for any abstract theories.  Liberty, he thought, was a very poetic, Millennium-like idea for stump-speeches