The soul beside him on the bridge came back from a lilac bower of other years, with a girl's lips glowing upon his and the beat of a girl's heart throbbing against his own. The soul was seared with images that must never find spoken words, and it moved the lips to say after exhaling a deep breath from its body, "Well, let's go home." There, too, was a question of identity. Who was Robert Hendricks? Was he the man chosen to lead his party organization because he was clean above reproach and a man of ideals; was he the man who was trusted with the money of the people of his town and county implicitly; or was he the man who knew that on page 234 of the cash ledger for 1879 in the county treasurer's office in the Garrison County court-house there was a forgery in his own handwriting to cover nine thousand dollars of his father's debt? Or was he the man who for seven years had crept into a neighbour's garden on a certain night in April to smell the lilac blossoms and always had found them gone, and had stood there rigid, with upturned face and clenched fists, cursing a fellow-man? Or was he the man who in the county convention of his party had risen pale with anger, and had walked across the floor and roared his denunciation of Elijah W. Bemis as a boodler and a scoundrel squarely to the man's gray, smirking face and chattering teeth, and then had reached down, and grabbed the trapped bribe-giver by the scruff of the neck and literally thrown him out of the convention, while the crowd went mad with applause? As he went home that night following the convention, walking by the side of Dolan in silence, he wondered which of all his _aliases_ he really was. At the gate of the Hendricks home the two men stopped. Hendricks smiled quizzically as he asked: "Well, I give it up, Jake. By the way, did you ever meet me?" The brown eyes of the Irishman beamed an instant through the night, before he hurried lightly down the street. And so with all of this hide-and-seek of souls, now peering from behind eyes and now far away patting one--two--three upon some distant base, with all these queer goings-on inside of people here in this strange world, it is no wonder that when the angels brought Jeanette to the Barclays, they left her much to learn and many things to study about. So she had to ask questions. But questions often reveal more than answers. At least once they revealed much, when she sat on the veranda of the Barclay home a fine spring evening with all the company there. Aunt Molly was there; and Uncle Bob Hendricks was there, the special guest of Grandma Barclay. Uncle Adrian was away on a trip somewhere; but Uncle Colonel and Grandma Culpepper and all the others were there listening to father's new German music-box, and no one should blame a little girl, sitting shyly on the stone steps, trying to make something out of the absurd world around her, if she piped out when the talk stopped:--