“Do you think he means it?” said Ray to Ogden, when they were back in Ray’s room.

“I wouldn’t think so if I hadn’t seen his face as he stood over that skunk.  But if ever a man looked murder he did at that moment.  And quiet old Peter of all men!”

“We must talk to him.  Do tell him that—­”

“Do you dare do it?”

“But you—?”

“I don’t.  Unless he speaks I shall—­”

“Ray and Ogden,” said a quiet voice, “I wish you would write out what you have just seen and heard.  It may be needed in the future.”

“Peter, let me speak,” cried Ray.  “You mustn’t do what you said.  Think of such an end to your life.  No matter what that scoundrel does, don’t end your life on a gallows.  It—­”

Peter held up his hand.  “You don’t know the American people, Ray.  If Maguire uses that lying story, I can kill him, and there isn’t a jury in the country which, when the truth was told, wouldn’t acquit me.  Maguire knows it, too.  We have heard the last of that threat, I’m sure.”

Peter went back to his office.  “I don’t wonder,” he thought, as he stood looking at the ink-stains on his desk and floor, “that people think politics nothing but trickery and scoundrelism.  Yet such vile weapons and slanders would not be used if there were not people vile and mean enough at heart to let such things influence them.  The fault is not in politics.  It is in humanity.”

CHAPTER L.

SUNSHINE.

But just as Peter was about to continue this rather unsatisfactory train of thought, his eye caught sight of a flattened bullet lying on the floor.  He picked it up, with a smile.  “I knew she was my good luck,” he said.  Then he took out the sachet again, and kissed the dented and bent coin.  Then he examined the photographs.  “Not even the dress is cut through,” he said gleefully, looking at the full length.  “It couldn’t have hit in a better place.”  When he came to the glove, however, he grieved a little over it.  Even this ceased to trouble him the next moment, for a telegram was laid on his desk.  It merely said, “Come by all means.  W.C.D’A.”  Yet that was enough to make Peter drop thoughts, work, and everything for a time.  He sat at his desk, gazing at a blank wall, and thinking of a pair of slate-colored eyes.  But his expression bore no resemblance to the one formerly assumed when that particular practice had been habitual.

Nor was this expression the only difference in this day, to mark the change from Peter past to Peter present.  For instead of manoeuvring to make Watts sit on the back seat, when he was met by the trap late that afternoon, at Newport, he took possession of that seat in the coolest possible manner, leaving the one by the driver to Watts.  Nor did Peter look away from the girl on that back seat.  Quite the contrary.  It did not seem to him that a thousand eyes would have been any too much.  Peter’s three months of gloom vanished, and became merely a contrast to heighten his present joy.  A sort of “shadow-box.”