At this there was wild applause.  I had the audience with me.  The offender remained silent and presently I finished my speech.  After that Mr. Mecklin made them cheer and weep, and Mr. Mellish made them laugh.  The meeting had been highly successful.

“You polished him off, all right,” said George Hutchins, as he took my hand.

“Who was he?”

“Oh, one of the local sore-heads.  Krebs put him up to it, of course.”

“Was Krebs here?” I asked.

“Sitting in the corner of the balcony.  That meeting must have made him feel sick.”  George bent forward and whispered in my ear:  “I thought Bill 709 was Watling’s idea.”

“Oh, I happened to be in the Potts House about that time,” I explained.

George, of whom it may be gathered that he was not wholly unsophisticated, grinned at me appreciatively.

“Say, Paret,” he replied, putting his hand through my arm, “there’s a little legal business in prospect down here that will require some handling, and I wish you’d come down after the campaign and talk it over, with us.  I’ve just about made up my mind that you’re he man to tackle it.”

“All right, I’ll come,” I said.

“And stay with me,” said George....

We went to his yellow-brick house for refreshments, salad and ice-cream and (in the face of the Hutchins traditions) champagne.  Others had been invited in, some twenty persons....  Once in a while, when I looked up, I met Maude’s eyes across the room.  I walked home with her, slowly, the length of the Hutchinses’ block.  Floating over the lake was a waning October moon that cast through the thinning maples a lace-work of shadows at our feet; I had the feeling of well-being that comes to heroes, and the presence of Maude Hutchins was an incense, a vestal incense far from unpleasing.  Yet she had reservations which appealed to me.  Hers was not a gushing provincialism, like that of Mrs. George.

“I liked your speech so much, Mr. Paret,” she told me.  “It seemed so sensible and—­controlled, compared to the others.  I have never thought a great deal about these things, of course, and I never understood before why taking away the tariff caused so much misery.  You made that quite plain.

“If so, I’m glad,” I said.

She was silent a moment.

“The working people here have had a hard time during the last year,” she went on.  “Some of the mills had to be shut down, you know.  It has troubled me.  Indeed, it has troubled all of us.  And what has made it more difficult, more painful is that many of them seem actually to dislike us.  They think it’s father’s fault, and that he could run all the mills if he wanted to.  I’ve been around a little with mother and sometimes the women wouldn’t accept any help from us; they said they’d rather starve than take charity, that they had the right to work.  But father couldn’t run the mills at a loss—­could he?”

“Certainly not,” I replied.