The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1912-11-11

instant foo1ishly smiling child-burnt into their memories, Haig and Mur- 1 ctell emerged from the home of War ren Blake. Haig stopped, looking up.
 'I wonder what John Dunmeade is going through just now7 I can see the end. The good have no luck. There's a curse on the man responsible for this night. Old man, do you say anaen7 You and will have to discuss the matter of payment
 He caught the other by the shoul- ders, peered closely into his face and, laughing harslly, turned away.
 Through night that seemed endless a man fought battle old as sin itself. He had sought the solitude Of the fields in blind, vain wish to escape the issue and the thing that filled his eyes. He had come so near to greatness And now, at an hour when he seemed most to need stimulus and support, he was brought face to face with the temptation to desert. It was one thing an a moment of disheartenment to cry, as he had cried to himself, ssI have come to the end" It was far different when opportunity had come to revive a sinking cause to stay his hand. He
  close, not an ExcaIfbur rising out of the waters to lend invincibility to him who would wie1d it., but . new prod for a calloused people, one fact the more to add to the knoTiedge. whose cumulative power in the end would-must-carry the people for ward, upward.
 It was Hampden, Katherine and John Bunmeade against the people.
 And what did he owe the people, the calloused fools whose knowledge, if not complete, was yet full enough to show them whither they were going and whither they must turn, but who trudged contentedly on, indifferent to all but the present profit. thinking only of self, repudiating and sneering at those who offered honest service and counsel? The balance was all against them and in his favor. Let some one else now take up the task to which John Dunmeade had been unequali
 He saw stephen Hampden covering, a suddenly broken, fear paisied man, before the death agony, looking with a dnd of wisfulness on the dying mans face, ss though in Warren B1ake's example he saw a way out of | the tangle. A troop of miserable, pitt l able figures marched before hiEn-Slay- ton, Brown, Parsons, Sheehan, Blake l men whom he had punished, whose | lives he had shattered or taken in his crusade-to what end? Their places had been taken by other men of like kind, the world no better, no wiser, l 50 far as he could see. Behind the | troop marched regiment of men and women, his neighbors, whose little | 1xr% AH l. l fail through his disclosures, but might be preserved if Murchell's promise to i intervene was kept. Was there not more virtue in mercy than in punish l ment?
 For long, in the fear of the man who knows himself weakening, he refused to face the crucial fact. But he had to come to tito her-at last. He saw her as he had last seen her, the rose in bloom, a strong woman re- fined and softened by some heart pro- cess of which he knew nothing. If he went forward he must cloud the splen- 1 dor and beauty of her womanhood with disgrace and suffering. He re- volted against the thought-why must 1 she, innocent, and at his hand, be made to suffer the penalty that others had earned? Could he strike the blow It made no difference that she had 1 fiouted him for unworthy things. As once before nothing that she could say had added to the temptation that lay in her very existence, so now noth- ing that she had done could take from the fact of his love. For it lived. He could find through the years in unceas- ing work an anodyne to deaden the ache, but on this Mount Olivet it lived again, a throbbing passion that sub merged all things else. He had not the strength of God, he told himself He could not be 50 merciless to her to himself.
 He fled homeward in the waning light and prayed feverishly for daylight
 By his window, as once he had watched a dawn of promise, he saw il come, but without promise. At last the battle ended, too tired to seek his bed, he fell asleep in the chair.