"I'm no prophet!" she defied him.
Just before he closed the door he spoke:
"But the election would not be until next fall——"
"We could extend our contract," she retorted, and the door closed on his laugh.
PART II
It seems sometimes as if a Harlequin rules the world. When once your tired eyes rest on what you know to be the last trick in his bag—lo! he turns the empty sack upside down, and it spills surprises, like the widow's cruse. Some such master jest he played on Barbara.
An absorbing interest had catapulted into her life, and wakened her like a bugle call. She had a fight on her hands and that means life to the Irish. Her extraordinary marriage made little real difference in the order of her days, except that she dined with an interesting man each night. He talked to her of the things he hoped to do, if the people of New York made him governor.
Always, except when political dinners or party caucus kept him too late, she found him pacing the corridor outside her dressing-room. Courteous, urbane, he took her to supper with friends, to a café, or back to the hotel, where they had something to eat in Bob's sitting-room. This last arrangement suited her best, for then she could lead him to talk of the fight ahead. He sometimes asked her judgment. She felt his single-purposed strength in these talks; she plumbed the force which had made him a success at forty.
"Why do you always make me talk about myself?" he asked her on one of these occasions of supper in her room.