"Not on his heart, Ike," corrected the chief cynic grimly; "merely on the place where his heart would be if he had any heart. He had one once, I guess, but from disuse it's withered up and been absorbed into the system. Remember, don't you, how just here the other week he clamped down on poor old Hank Needham and squeezed the last cent out of him? He'll win, though, mark my words on it. He always has had his way and he'll keep on having it. Lord, Lord, and I can remember when we used to send real men to Washington from this state--human he-men, not glorified dollar-grabbers always looking for the main chance. Given half a show, Hank Needham could have come back; now he's flat busted and he'll be dead in six months, or I miss my guess." These isolated two--the official crab and his understudy--were the only men in the room, barring club servants, who remained aloof from the circle surrounding the candidate. They bided on where they were, eyeing him from under their drooped eyelids when, at the end of a happy hour, he passed out, a strong, erect, soldierly man in his ripening fifties. Then, together, they both grunted eloquently. In a fine glow of contentment Jerome Bracken walked to his house. He wanted the exercise, he wanted to be alone for a little while with his optimism. He was almost home when a city hospital ambulance hurried past him, its gong clanging for passage in the traffic of early evening. Just after it got by he saw a white-coated interne and a policeman wrestling with somebody who seemed to be fastened down to a stretcher in the interior of the motor, and from that struggling somebody he heard delirious sobbing outcries in a voice that was feminine and yet almost too coarsened and thick to be feminine. Vaguely it irked him that even for a passing moment this interruption should break in on his thoughts. But no untoward thing disturbed the household rhapsody that night. There, as at the office, the bell on the telephone kept ringing almost constantly, and, being answered, the telephone yielded only felicitating words from all and sundry who had called up. A man who had no shadow of earthly doubt touching on his destinies slept that night in Jerome Bracken's bed. And if he dreamed we may be well assured that his dreams were untroubled by specters of any who had besought him for mercy and had found it not. A conscience that is lapped in eider-down is nearly always an easy conscience. * * * * *