Perhaps Kinsard alone appreciated in this edifying demonstration Harshaw’s policy. He could not be tempted to run counter. He would not slack his pursuit of Gwinnan for another trail, however alluring. He had higher game in view than the stripling’s insults could furnish. And he had made himself an example of marvelous tolerance, forbearance, and dignity. Kinsard, lowering and pierced with all the barbed realization of futility and defeat, adopted his words, refused to retract or apologize, and, being commanded by the speaker to withdraw, took up his hat, and, with a scornful, indifferent manner that angered every member as if charged with a personal relation, strode out of the room. Harshaw had followed his motions with narrowing eyelids. His attention had relaxed with momentary exultation at this result. He was smiling a little in his beard, and he glanced in a debonair preoccupation out of the window near his seat. The sky was red, for the sun was going down. He noted the flush with a casual eye, unprescient how it should be with him when the day, fading now and dropping its dulling petals on every side, should whitely bloom again. Then he reverted with zest to the proceedings within. Kinsard walked slowly along the portico to the flight of steps. A belt of clouds, their edges glinting with gold, obscured the scarlet disk of the sun, but from their lower verge a great glory of yellow light gushed down, each of the multitudinous rays distinct, giving a fibrous effect, upon the blue hills of the horizon, upon the city in the foreground. Here and there they struck upon a spire or a tin roof that responded with a glister fiercely white. The intervals showed soft shadows of restful tints, the tops of the budding trees, the silver-gray shingles of an old house, and here and there an open space where the renewed blue-grass grew apace. It wore a dark richness all adown the slopes of the Capitol hill. Somehow as he noted it there was borne upon him for the moment a subtle intimation of the serenity of that life of Nature close to our artificial existence,—mysterious, inevitable, quiescent. The contrast gave a sharpened sense of the turmoils of his heart, the weariness of his spirit, the rasping jars of his petty cares. He paused on the sidewalk and looked about him. Then he produced a cigar, and took his way down into the city.