Before the pathos of the call something in Stroude’s soul trembled. He didn’t love Dell now, he told himself as he came to the end of the page. He hadn’t loved her in twenty years. There was no thrill of remembered passion rising from the white page to stir his heart, but there was something deeper, more poignant than romance in the plea which this woman in the mountains had sent him across time and distance. Through those long years she had never wavered in her belief in him and in the promise he had made to her. Out of the depths of his spirit he had told her that he would come to her if she should ever need him. It was a promise given not only to the woman who had heard and heeded it, but to the God of his faith and his fathers. If he failed to keep it, no matter what the cost, he would be violating more than an old love. He would be tearing down his own code. Through whatever glory might come to him he would know himself as a man who had failed in the one virtue on which he had always prided himself, the keeping of his word. It was an oath he had taken to Dell Martin, just as he would take an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States if--if he climbed the mountain of Rhoda’s vision! Realization of the immediacy of his problem came to him with the sight of his wife’s fan, broken, lying beyond the letter in his hand. He looked up to find Rhoda’s eyes studying him. But he must not fail her, he told himself, snatching at the straw of conventionality in the current of emotion. The very fact that he had not given her love put him under obligation to her. Because of her, because of the expectations she had harboured for him, because of the time and thought and labour she had spent for the advancement she had thought he sought, because of her very disillusionment now, he could not fail her. He must go to the conference, even if it meant the breaking of a vow he had made before the altar of his one great love. It was part of the price, he reasoned, that all men pay for power; but he felt that something within him was dying as he turned the page of Dell Martin’s letter. “--_if I called for you_,” he picked up the thread. “_That was why I didn’t call when I needed you before, when our boy was born. I couldn’t let you know about him. You’d never have let me go if you’d known. But it doesn’t matter now, does it? And oh, Burt, I need you so! If you’ll only hold my hand again, I won’t fear the crossing. And perhaps when you come to die, you’ll find the going easier if you have the memory of this hour you’ll give me. Won’t you come?_” It was signed waveringly, “_Dell_.” He folded it back into the envelope, and put it in his pocket. “You aren’t going?” Rhoda asked him, her voice strangely strained. “Yes,” he said, “I’m going.” “But to-morrow----” “It’s the long years afterward I’m thinking of,” he told her. “And the nomination----” “Sometimes the things we put out of our lives,” he said, “are the only things we really keep.”