The thrill of the night wind, prematurely warm as it crossed the Potomac, and burdened with elusive odours of a Southern March, caught him unawares. For a moment he stood drinking deeply of the immortal beauty of the recurrent springtime. Memories he had thought long dead and buried went over him. Pictures more vivid than those on the walls framed themselves in the darkened greenery of the little park: a girl in a faded gingham dress waving him welcome on a hill road, a girl with eyes brighter than mountain stars telling him her love, flinging away all thought or care of herself, giving him everything and glorying in the gift, even to the last sacrifice of her departure from him. Not as she was now, Boyce Martin’s wife dying in that far-away little community of his native hills, but as she had been when she had defied their little world to come to him, Stroude saw her. In the thought of what she had been to him, he flung out his arms. “After all these years,” he muttered, “after all these years!” And as if drawn by a power stronger than his will, he crossed to the table, and picking up the telephone, called the information desk of the Union Station. “What time does the Mountain Mail on the C. & O. go out now?” he asked. “One o’clock? One-fifteen.” He hung up the receiver and saw again the photograph of his wife. He studied it with suddenly arrested attention. What would she think of his desire to leave Washington at a time when, according to her fundamental ideas, his presence was imperative for the fulfillment of his ambition? Or was it her ambition? He gazed at the pictured countenance, seeing the determination of the uplifted chin, meeting the challenge in the steady eyes. Rhoda was certainly her father’s daughter. Old Peter Armond’s indomitable will and shrewdly calculating brain lived on in her. For the fourteen--or was it fifteen?--years of their marriage she had managed Stroude’s career as cleverly as ever her father had directed one of his lieutenants, and he had acknowledged his debt to her with a certain attitude of amusement. Now, facing the last triumphal stage of its development, he felt an angry distaste of Rhoda’s manœuvring. It might bring him, he conceded, to the goal but he wished he might have travelled a simpler path.