Neither magazine nor newspaper could hold his attention on the train. His mind could not be made to forget the weight that lay upon it; his heart could not be numbed to pain by anaesthetic. Jim was young. Suffering was new to him, and experience had not showed him how best to endure it. It was not the ruin that hung over his business that clouded with anguish the eyes he fixed on the scudding landscape. It was not the knowledge that he was in a corner, fighting for his financial life with his back to the wall. It was Marie—only Marie. Youth can look forward to the building of another fortune; the losses of to-day will be wiped out in the gains of to-morrow. But when love crashes down in sordid ruin there is no to-morrow. Youth cannot see that the unguent of time will close the wound; it can see only that hope, the sweet anticipations which make of the future a magical realm almost within the grasp of the extending hand, has been swept away beyond recall. Marie was not true, steadfast, as he had believed; her soul did not shine clearly, purely, with the guiding light he thought he had seen. Marie, the wonderful, the womanly, was erased from the picture; replaced by one sordid, despicable, treacherous even. Perhaps the bitterest pain is rending asunder of the trust of youth. What remained? Work, feverish exertion, the comfort of facing an antagonist, of straining breast to breast with him. At the junction Jim changed to the Diversity railroad. In the smoker when he entered was a sprinkling of Diversity folk, who, as the train got in motion, edged together to talk politics. Politics in Diversity was a topic of conversation as it had not been for twenty years. Zaanan Frame had taken the zest from it. He had been the county’s politics so long. In the eyes of the inhabitants the present condition assumed almost the importance of a revolution. “Zaanan’s beat, and he knows it,” was an opinion boldly expressed. “He hain’t even makin’ a fight for it. Calc’late he’s too old.” “Calc’late,” replied a gesticulating individual, “he’s plum disgusted. Who’s the best friend Diversity folks has had, eh? Zaanan Frame; that’s who. And now, because a dollar for a vote is easy money to earn, men that ought to think shame is turnin’ against him. It hain’t that he can’t fight. Don’t git sich an idee into your head. It’s that he’s too disgusted to fight.” “He’s run things long enough. Nobody kin call his soul his own. He comes perty clost to sayin’ who shall marry who, and which kind of a baby they’ll have after they’re married. We hain’t goin’ to stand that kind of thing much longer. No, sir; we’re a-goin’ to run our own affairs like we want to—” “You’re a-goin’ to swap Zaanan Frame for Michael Moran, that’s what you’re goin’ to do—and you’re welcome to your bargain. Wait till Moran gits the power Zaanan’s got now. See how he uses it. Has any feller here got a word to say ag’in Zaanan’s honesty? Eh?” Nobody replied.