Andrew the Glad

"Yes," answered the major dryly, "I feel sure that Phoebe is ill. She is

at present, I should judge, suffering with a malady which she has had for

some time but which is about to reach the acute stage. It needs judicious

ignoring so let's not mention it to her for the present."

"I understand what you mean, Major," answered his wife with delighted

eyes, "and I won't say a word about it. It will be such a help to David

to have a wife when he is the judge. How long will it be before he can be

the governor, dear?"

"That depends on the wife, Mrs. Buchanan, to a large extent," answered

the major with a delighted smile.

"Oh, Phoebe will want him to do things," said Mrs. Matilda positively.

"No doubt of that," the major replied. "I see David Kildare slated for

the full life from now on--eh, Caroline?"

And the major had judged Phoebe's situation perhaps more rightly than he

realized, for while David led the vote-directors' rally at the theater

and later was closeted with Andrew for hours over the last editorial

appeal in the morning _Journal_, Phoebe sat before her desk in her own

little down-town home. Mammy Kitty was snoring away like a peaceful

watch-dog on her cot in the dressing-room and the whole apartment was

dark save for the shaded desk-light.

The time and place were fitting and Phoebe was summoning her visions--and

facing her realities. Down the years came sauntering the nonchalant

figure of David Kildare. He had asked her to marry him that awful,

lonely, sixteenth birthday and he had asked her the same thing every

year of all the succeeding ten--and a number of times in between. Phoebe

squared herself to her reviewing self and admitted that she had cared for

him then and ever since--_cared_ for him, but had starved his tenderness

and in the lover had left unsought the man. But she was clear-sighted

enough to know that the handsome easy-going boy, who had wooed with a

smile and taken rebuff with a laugh, was not the steady-eyed forceful man

who now faced her. He stood at the door of a life that stretched away

into long vistas, and now he would demand. Phoebe bowed her head on her

hands--suppose he should not demand!

And so in the watches of the night the siege was raised and Phoebe, the

dauntless, brilliant, arrogant Phoebe had capitulated. No love-lorn woman

of the ages ever palpitated more thoroughly at the thought of her lover

than did she as she kept vigil with David across the city.

But there were articles of capitulation yet to be signed and the ceremony

of surrender to come.