"I'll show you. You shall have the fate of Keeton as much in your hands as if you owned the whole concern--a deuced deal more, in fact, than if you owned the whole concern, in days of ballot like these. I believe you do own a good many of the houses there now, don't you?" "I hardly know; but I know that if I do, I wish I didn't." "Very well; just you try what you can get out of your influence over your tenants--that's all." "Then how am I to become returning officer for Keeton?" "That's quite another thing. That depends on me." "On you, Mr. St. Paul?" "On me. Just listen." St. Paul had been seated in his favorite attitude of careless indolence in a very low chair, so low that his long legs seemed as if they stretched half way across the room. His position, joined with an expression of self-satisfied lawlessness in his face, might have whimsically suggested a sort of resemblance to Milton's arch fiend "stretched out huge at length," in one of his less malign humors. He now jumped up and stood on the hearth-rug, with his back to the fireplace, his slightly stooping shoulders only seeming to make him look taller than otherwise, because they might set people wondering as to the height he would have reached if he had only stood erect and made the most of his inches. His blue eyes had quite a sparkle of excited interest in them, and his prematurely bald forehead looked oddly infantine over these eyes and that keen, fearless mouth. "Look here, Miss Grey, it's all in your hands. You know both these fellows, don't you?" "Both what fellows?" "These fellows who want to get in for Keeton. You know them both. Now which of them do you want to win?" "What can it matter which way my wishes go--if they went any way?" "How like a woman! How very like a woman!" and he laughed. "What is like a woman? I know when a man says anything is like a woman, he means to say that it is ridiculous." "Well, that's true enough; that is about what we do mean in most cases. What I meant in this case was only that you would not answer my question. I put a plain direct question, to which you must have some answer to give, and you only asked me a question in return which had nothing to do with mine." "Perhaps I have no answer to give. I may have the answer in my own mind, and yet not have it to give to any one else." "Oh, but you may really give it to me! In strictest confidence I assure you; no living soul shall ever know from me. Come, Miss Grey, let me know the truth. It can't possibly do you any harm--or anybody harm for that matter, except the wrong man for I take it for granted that the man you don't favor must be the wrong man." "But I don't know that I ought to have anything to do with such a matter----"