As he looked out the window he became telepathically aware of a presence, and turned to behold Emily standing in the wide door that led into the hall, parting the heavy curtains with trembling hands. He sprang to his feet and took a step towards her. She advanced to meet him, she stretched out her hands, she took him by the arms; she turned him half around that the light might fall full in his face, and then she let her eyes melt into his. And before he could move, or say one word of all he had intended to say, her face gladdened like the sky at dawn, and she smiled and said: "Ah, Jerome--I knew it, I knew it!" And then she hid herself against his breast, and he put his arms about her. "Did you ever believe it for one little instant?" he whispered, bending over her, after he had drunk to the uttermost the ecstasy and the anguish of that moment. "Not for one little instant," she whispered. "Oh, not for one little instant! I knew it couldn't be!" And Garwood, looking over the masses of her hair, again saw old Jasper working away in the yard. He was singing now, and Garwood knew that ever after in his memory the aged negro would live in association with that scene. When they were sitting on the divan, side by side, and the morning was gone, Emily asked him, out of the half-affected simplicity Garwood loved to have her adopt, as most men do, because of the tribute to their superior intelligence it implies: "Jerome, what is a roorback?" He was silent for a moment, and then he said: "A roorback, dear, is a lie told because of the necessities of politics." "And are lies necessary in politics?" "Always, it seems," he said. XI A man whose figure had taken on the full contour of a prosperous maturity sat at his desk, reflectively drawing little geometrical designs on a pad of paper. The abundance of his prosperousness was indicated in every appointment of his law offices no less than in his own person, for they reflected the modern metropolitan style of Chicago rather than the fashion of an older day in central Illinois, where a bare floor, a flat table, and a rough set of bookshelves bearing up Blackstone and Kent, Chitty and Starkie, and the Illinois digests and reports, were considered sufficient furnishing. His silvery hair was cropped close with a half bang over his clear forehead, and his gray beard was as carefully trimmed as his hair; in the lapel of the gray coat that set his shoulders off stoutly, was a red carnation. He wore a fresh carnation every day; where he got them was ever a mystery to the people of Clinton.