whatever they were.  They had come to trouble her girlhood at Montgomery, when the snow whitened the campus and the wind sang in the trees.  She was grateful that the minister had turned his back.  Her hands trembled as she glanced again at the scribbled fly leaf; and more closely at the words penciled at the bottom:  “Baptized Elizabeth at Harris’s.”  Thatcher wanted this book to use against Bassett.  Bassett was a collector of fine bindings; she had heard it spoken of in the family.  It was part of Marian’s pride in her father that he was a bookish man.  When the minister returned to his seat Sylvia asked as she put down the book:—­

“Who was Elizabeth?”

And then, little by little, in his abrupt way, he told the story, much as he had told it that night on the Kankakee, with pauses for which Sylvia was grateful—­they gave her time for thought, for filling in the lapses, for visualizing the scene he described.  And the shadow of the Morton Bassett she knew crept into the picture.  She recalled their early meetings, that first brief contact on the shore of the lake; their talk on the day following the convention when she had laughed at him; that wet evening when they met in the street and he had expressed his interest in Harwood and the hope that she might care for the young lawyer.  With her trained habits of reasoning she rejected this or that bit of testimony as worthless; but even then enough remained to chill her heart.  Her hands were cold as she clasped them together.  Who was Elizabeth?  Ah, who was Sylvia?  The phrase of the song that had brought her to tears that starry night on the lake when Dan Harwood had asked her to marry him smote her again.  Her grandfather’s evasion of her questions about her father and mother, and the twinges of heartache she had experienced at college when other girls spoke of their homes, assumed now for the first time a sinister meaning.  Had she, indeed, come into the world in dishonor, and had she in truth known that far hill country, with its evergreens and glistening snows?

Ware had finished his story, and sat staring into the crackling fire.  At last he turned toward Sylvia.  In the glow of the desk lamp her face was white, and she gazed with unseeing eyes at the inscription in the book.

The silence was still unbroken when a few minutes later Mrs. Ware came in with Harwood, whom she had met in the street and brought home to dinner.

Dan was full of the situation in the legislature, and the table talk played about that topic.

“We’re sparring for time, that’s all, and the people pay the freight!  The deadlock is clamped on tight.  I never thought Thatcher would prove so strong.  I think we could shake loose enough votes from both sides to precipitate a stampede for Ramsay, but he won’t hear to it.  He says he wants to do the state one patriotic service before he dies by cleaning out the bosses, and he doesn’t want to spoil the record by taking the senatorship himself.  Meanwhile Bassett stands fast and there’s no telling when he’ll break through Thatcher’s lines.”