Again outside the door, he muttered gleefully: “Yes, we’ve him. Otherwise he would have had his servants kick me down stairs. Gad, no wonder —— is on his way to the Presidency, I had a sneaking fear that this fellow might be sincere. But he saw through him without ever having seen him. I suppose two men of that stripe instinctively understand each other.”
That was on a Sunday afternoon. On the following Wednesday, as Marian came into Howard’s sitting-room with the newspapers, she laughed: “I’ve been reading such a speech from your candidate, you radical! I must say I liked to read it. It was so like you, your very phrases in many places, the things you used to talk to me before you gave me up as hopeless. Just listen.”
And she read him the oration—a reproduction of the Howard she first saw, the Howard she admired and loved and had never lost. “Isn’t it superb?” she asked at the end. “You must have written it for him. Don’t you like it?”
“Very able,” was Howard’s only comment.
Marian continued to read the paper, glancing from column to column, giving him the substance of the news. Soon she reached the editorial page. He was stealthily watching her face. He saw her glance through a few lines of the leader, start, read on, look in a terrified way at him, and then skip abruptly to the next page.
“Read me the leader, won’t you?” he asked.
“My voice is tired,” she pleaded. “I’ll read it after awhile.”
“Please,” he insisted. “I’m especially anxious to hear it.”
“I think,” she almost stammered, “that somebody has taken advantage of your illness. I didn’t want to tell you until I’d had a chance to think.”