"Can you trust yourself?" she asked.
Harry's tongue touched his lips—as it had done in his inner office on the day of the trial, when he stood looking at her picture on his desk. Since that day he had known no breath of the periodic craving. But now, curiously, he felt his mouth growing all at once arid and dry with the old slinking thirst. Could he trust himself? The question seemed to thrust itself at him with a malevolent significance. How much of his will had he indeed, surrendered? Did he know?
There rose up suddenly in him a savage resolution. Not another drop upon his lips—never, never! Not for the sake of success, not for his very life, never so long as he lived!
He took her hands in both his own, leaned down and kissed them. Then, without a word he went rapidly from her.
CHAPTER X
AFTER A YEAR
Lawrence Treadwell, the attorney, sat in his office negligently smoking a segar and staring down through the open window upon the busy thoroughfare beneath. Outside was the spring sunshine and the smell of growing trees. Just across from the building stood the city's new Opera House, over whose ambitious entrance was still stretched a canvas sign advertising a mass-meeting held the evening before under the auspices of the Civic Club.
He read the lettering reflectively as he blew out clouds of the fragrant, opalescent incense: "Protest Against Machine-Rule." He smiled. The old revolt of the Quixotic handful against the entrenched forces that had governed the city for a generation—one more of the popular ebullitions which punctuate modern progress, the familiar periodic dust-storms from whose turmoil the Old Guard emerged, moveless as ever in the saddle, to a new campaign dictated by the mighty Over-Lord, the great Public Services Corporation which, through its multiple ramifications, assumed to control the state's franchises, to dictate its significant legislation—even to influence its judiciary. As he read the words on the canvas bellying in the breeze, his smile was cynical.
Yet the smile had a touch of wistfulness too. The movement had grown out of the general unrest, the keener public conscience, that had accompanied the political renaissance that in the past year had been sweeping over a dozen commonwealths. In the old southern city, wherein principles were not yet become mere hypocrisies and folk still preserved old-fashioned political ideals, it had attained to the prestige of well-known names and engaging personalities. Their forefathers had been men to whom honour and cleanliness in public life had meant all things and who had governed as naturally as they had breathed. And there were many among these to whom the new era, with its open sneer at public trust and its subservience to great aggregations of wealth selfishly employed, had become an increasing reproach. The man who gazed down from the office window had long ago made his choice. He had no illusions. He knew to what allegiance he owed his present position. It had been the reward of long and faithful service! Yet sometimes still the bonds chafed—sometimes still the new spirit that was stirring abroad struck through his ingrained habit, calling to him to do the impossibly fanatical thing!