“Just wait a minute, son,” he would say.  “I’ve got to make some speeches myself.  Repeat that, now.  ’Sins of omission are as great, even greater than sins of commission.  The lethargic citizen throws open the gates to revolution.’  How do you spell ’lethargic’?”

But it was not Hendricks and his campaign that kept the F.M. of M. awake until dawn.  He sat in front of his soft coal fire, and when it died to gray-white ash he still sat there, unconscious of the chill of the spring night.  Mostly he thought of Lily, and of Louis Akers, big and handsome, of his insolent eyes and his self-indulgent mouth.  Into that curious whirlpool that is the mind came now and then other visions:  His mother asleep in her chair; the men in the War Department who had turned him down; a girl at home who had loved him, and made him feel desperately unhappy because he could not love her in return.  Was love always like that?  If it was what He intended, why was it so often without reciprocation?

He took to walking about the room, according to his old habit, and obediently Jinx followed him.

It was four by his alarm clock when Edith knocked at his door.  She was in a wrapper flung over her nightgown, and with her hair flying loose she looked childish and very small.

“I wish you would go to bed,” she said, rather petulantly.  “Are you sick, or anything?”

“I was thinking, Edith.  I’m sorry.  I’ll go at once.  Why aren’t you asleep?”

“I don’t sleep much lately.”  Their voices were cautious.  “I never go to sleep until you’re settled down, anyhow.”

“Why not?  Am I noisy?”

“It’s not that.”

She went away, a drooping, listless figure that climbed the stairs slowly and left him in the doorway, puzzled and uncomfortable.

At six that morning Dan, tip-toeing downstairs to warm his left-over coffee and get his own breakfast, heard a voice from Willy Cameron’s room, and opened the door.  Willy Cameron was sitting up in bed with his eyes closed and his arms extended, and was concluding a speech to a dream audience in deep and oratorical tones.

“By God, it is time the plain people know their power.”

Dan grinned, and, his ideas of humor being rather primitive, he edged his way into the room and filled the orator’s sponge with icy water from the pitcher.

“All right, old top,” he said, “but it is also time the plain people got up.”

Then he flung the sponge and departed with extreme expedition.

CHAPTER XVI

It was not until a week had passed after Louis Akers’ visit to the house that Lily’s family learned of it.

Lily’s state of mind during that week had been an unhappy one.  She magnified the incident until her nerves were on edge, and Grace, finding her alternating between almost demonstrative affection and strange aloofness, was bewildered and hurt.  Mademoiselle watched her secretly, shook her head, and set herself to work to find out what was wrong.  It was, in the end, Mademoiselle who precipitated the crisis.