hovered over the comprehension of a joke, as a bright, peculiar seraph might hover over some muddy absurdity jogging along the highway of this world, but she had so many other emotions to take care of, they shed such prismatic colours around her, that her humour could not always be depended on.

The door-bell rang, and Aidee came in. Hennion felt nearly benevolent, as he shook hands and towered over him. Aidee was slight, black-haired, black-eyed, smooth-faced, and pale. Miss Eunice entered. She had the air of condemning the monstrous world for its rotundity and reckless orbit. Mr. Champney's white head and sunken shoulders loomed behind her. The five sat about the centre-table. A chandelier glittered overhead.

Hennion felt amused and interested in the scene. Mr. Champney's big white head was bowed over and his eyes glowed under shaggy brows; Camilla was breathless and bright with interest; Miss Eunice had her gold-rimmed glasses fixed in qualified approval on Aidee, who was not rotund, though his orbit seemed to be growing reckless. He was on his feet, pacing the floor and talking rapidly. It occurred to Hennion that Aidee was a peculiar man, and at that moment making a masterful speech. He swept together at first a number of general ideas which did not interest Hennion, who looked, in fact, at Camilla. Aidee drew nearer in particulars. Hennion felt himself caught in the centre of a narrowing circle of propositions. He ceased to be amused. It was interesting, but disagreeable. He appreciated the skill of the performance, and returned to dislike the performer, who leaned forward now, with his hands on the table.

"Mr. Hennion, you don't belong to that class of men or that class of ideas. You are doing good work for this city in your profession. You put your right hand to it. We share its benefits. But your left hand is mixed up with something that is not upbuilding, but a sapping of foundations. Here the hopes of our fathers are more than fulfilled, and here they are bitterly disappointed. How do you come to have a share—in both of these results?"

Mr. Champney lifted his brows, appreciating the rhetoric. Camilla's face was flushed with excitement. How glorious! And now, Dick!

Hennion resented the situation. His length and impassiveness helped him, so that he seemed to be holding it easily, but he felt like nothing of that kind. Talking for exhibition, or approval, was a thing his soul abhorred in himself, and observed but curiously in other men. He felt that Camilla expected him to talk with elevation, from the standpoint of a noble sinner now nobly repentant, some such florid circus performance. He felt drawn in obstinacy to mark out his position with matter-of-fact candour. Aidee's rhetoric only emphasised what seemed to Hennion a kind of unreal, gaudy emotionalism.

"I am not in politics, Mr. Aidee. I meet with it as an incident to business. I sometimes do engineering for the city. I am supposed to have a certain amount in preference on contracts, and to give a certain amount of preference on jobs to workmen your city politicians send, provided they're good workmen. Maybe when they vote they understand themselves to be voting for their jobs. They're partly mistaken. I contract with them to suit my business interests, but I never canvass. Probably the ward leaders do. I suppose there's a point in all this affair. I'd rather come to it, if you don't mind. You want me to do personal wire-pulling, which I never do and don't like, in order to down certain men I am under obligations to, which doesn't seem honourable, and against my business interests, which doesn't seem reasonable."

"Wire-pulling? No."

"Why, yes. That's what you're doing now, isn't it? You think I'm a wire that pulls a lot of other wires. Of course it's all right, if you like it, or think you have to, but I don't like it, and don't see that I have to."

Aidee hesitated.

"Miss Champney——"

Hennion was sharp and angry in a moment.

"Mr. Aidee, the standards of my class are not supposed to be up to yours——"

"Why not? Class! I have no class!"

"I don't know why not. I don't seem to care just now. But not everyone even of my class would have cared to ask Miss Champney to oblige them this way."

"Why not?"

"Because we have more scruples than we advertise. I beg your pardon."

"The apology seems in place," rumbled Mr. Champney, his voice vibrating thorough bass.

"I offer it to you, too, sir. The situation is forced on me."

"The gentleman doesn't like the situation. I suggest"—Champney heaved his wide frame out of the chair—"that he be released from his situation."

"Do you like the situation, sir?"

"I do not, sir," with rising thunder. "I hope, if this discussion is continued here, or elsewhere,"—appearing to imply a preference for "elsewhere,"—"it will have no reference to my family."

Mr. Champney withdrew royally. Miss Eunice followed, a suspicion of meekness and fright in her manner, her glasses tilted sideways. Aidee stood still a moment. Then he said quietly:

"I have made a mistake. Good-night," and took his leave. He looked tired and weighed down.

Hennion felt the air as full of echoes and vibrations subsiding.

Camilla wept with her head on the table.

"I'm sorry, Milly. It was a shocking row."

Camilla felt her soul in too great tumult to consider either humour or repentance.

Going past the piles of brick, on Lower Bank Street, Hennion felt like shoving them all into the Muscadine, and Aidee and Wood after them. He wanted his private life and work, and Camilla. But Camilla hovered away from him, and would not be drawn nearer. She was a puzzling seraph, and the world was a puzzling world, in whose algebra the equations were too apt to have odd zeros and miscellaneous infinities dropped among them to suit the taste of an engineer. It seemed to be constructed not altogether and solely for business men to do business in, else why such men as Aidee, so irrationally forcible? And why such girls as Camilla to fill a practical man's soul with misty dreams, and draw him whither he would not?

"Wisdom," says the man in the street, "is one of those things which do not come to one who sits down and waits." There was once a persuasion that wisdom would come to nothing else than just such leisure and patient attendance; but the man in the street has made his "hustling" his philosophy, and made the Copernican discovery that the street, and no longer the study, nor yet the hall of legislature, is the centre of the wheeling system. There the main current runs; elsewhere are eddies, backwaters, odd futilities, and these, too, fall into the current eventually and pour on. Life is governed and convinced by the large repetitions of "hunger and labour, seed-time and harvest, love and death," and of these the first four make their reports in the street.

Only love and death seem to have their still eccentric orbits, not Copernican, and even the street is content to refer them to seven celestial spheres and a primum mobile, and say no more.

CHAPTER III—CAMILLA

SOMEONE once suggested that Camilla was "a type," and Miss Eunice found comfort in the suggestion. To most of her friends she seemed nothing else than Camilla, a term inclusive and select, meaning something radiant and surprising, valuable for the zest that came with her and lingered after her going. They said that, if she had been born to masculine destinies, she would have been another Henry Champ-ney, a Camillus with

"The fervent love Camillus bore

His native land."

In that case she would not have been Camilla. Here speculation paused.

In general they agreed that she walked and talked harmoniously, and was lovely and lovable, with grey eyes and lifted brows,