The Senator's face seemed at once to age and trench with lines. He motioned her to the vacated chair and remained bending forward over his desk till she had seated herself. Then, he sat down, suddenly remembered his hat, and laid it off. If she had sunk forward on the desk weeping; if she had made a sign of appeal; he would have gone round and caressed her and petted her and told her she must _stop_ Wayland. His whole manhood went out to comfort her, to stand between her and what? . . . Was it the drive of those wheels of which he was a cog? But when she looked across the desk, the eyes had no appeal, the Search Light had turned on him. "You must excuse me if you heard what I was saying, when you came in, Miss Eleanor; but it was a G-- doggon lie! I had been angered: I had been angered very much; and that's a bad thing on a hot day." He was slipping back to the usual suavity. CHAPTER XIX BALLOTS FOR BULLETS It was Calamity, who had carried the trouble-making coat across from the Mission Library to the MacDonald Ranch House. Eleanor had found it in the big living room that day after she had read the note saying he was setting out "on the Long Trail, the trail this Nation will have to follow before Democracy arrives; the trail of the Man behind the Thing." Somehow, she lost interest in her reading and her driving, and spent the most of that first week after the funeral in the steamer chair on the Ranch House piazza. Were the topaz gates of the sunset still ajar to a new infinite life; or did satyr faces haunt the shadows of the trail, satyr faces of the Greed that had plotted the bloody villainy of the Rim Rocks? She had thought she knew joy before, joy that rapt her from life in a race reverie. Now, she knew joy, tense as pain; and the consciousness never left her. It was there; beside, inside, above, all round, an enveloping atmosphere to everything she thought and said and did. She could not read; for while her eyes passed _over_ the lines, that consciousness danced in flames _between_ the lines. She tried to forget herself in her work--in the sorting of the littered shelves, in the mending for the ranch hands absent with her father in the Upper Pass; but It was there just the same, at her elbow; in behind the commonplace weaving rainbow mists, a shadowy deity of thought all pervasive as ether. Before, she had been as one standing in front of the up-lifted veil. Now, she knew she had passed in behind the veil, and could not if she would come out to the former place. Life symbols empty of meaning before, suddenly became allegorical of eternity--the bridal veil, the orange wreaths, the ring typical of the infinite, the vows of service, the angel of the drawn sword on the back trail. Yet she knew she had promised to keep him resolute, standing strong to his work, unflinching because of her.