“If I’d been beaten?”
“Yes.”
“I missed you this afternoon,” he said. “I looked for you everywhere.”
“There were enough there, weren’t there?”
“No, not quite,” he said; “the crowd lacked one, just one.” He spoke with a little injury in his tone. And the girl, with her quick apperception of it, said:
“I wanted you all to myself, dear. I can give you part of the time to the public—but I can’t share you.” She said this in the pride of a new conception of Garwood that had just come to her—a conception of him as a public man, sacrificing himself for the people. Garwood himself instantly shared the conception.
“Isn’t that better?” she added.
For answer he took her hand again, pressing it in his big palm.
“And now tell me,” she said.
So he told her the story of the Clinton convention; how the delegations from the seven counties that comprised the Thirteenth Congressional District, his district, as he was already careful to speak of it, had gone there and stubbornly balloted for one, two, three days without a change or a break, until a thousand ballots had been cast, and men were worn and spent with the long-drawn agony of those tense hours in the stifling opera house. He felt a touch of the old fear that had come over him when he heard on Thursday night that Tazewell County would go to Sprague the next day, and it looked as if, the deadlock thus broken, Sprague would be chosen.