"A vacuum cleaner is what this place requires," she said. "But _isn't_ it a quaint old house?" He pressed his shaking hands to his closed eyes, then forced them to open upon the terrible desolation where _she_ had stood a moment since--and saw bare boards under foot, bare walls, cobwebs, dust. The girl was tiptoeing around the four walls examining the condition of the woodwork. "It only needs electric lights and a furnace in the cellar and some kalsomine and pretty wall paper----" She turned to glance back at him, and stood so, regarding him with amused curiosity--for he had dropped on his knees in the dust, groping in an odd blind way for a flower that had just fallen from his coat. "There are millions of them by the roadside," she said as he stumbled to his feet and drew the frail blossom through his buttonhole with unsteady fingers. "Yes," he said, "there are other roses in the world." Then he drew a deep, quiet breath and smiled at her. She smiled, too. "This was her room," she explained, "the room where she first met her husband, the room into which she came a bride, the room where she died, poor thing. Oh, I forgot that you don't know who _she_ was!" "Elizabeth Tennant," he answered calmly. "Why--how did _you_ know?" "God knows," he said; and bent his head, touching the petals of the wild rose with his lips. Then he looked up straight into her eyes--one was hazel-brown, one hazel tinged with grey. [Illustration] [Illustration] XXII AS they left the house an hour later, walking down the path slowly, shoulder to shoulder, she said: "Mr. Brown, I _want_ you to like that house." A sudden and subtly hideous idea glided into his brain. "_You_ don't believe in suffragettes, do you?" he said, forcing a hollow laugh. "Why, I _am_ one. Didn't you know it?" "_You!_" "Certainly. Goodness! how you did run! But," she added with innocent satisfaction, "I think I have secured every bit as good a one as the one Gladys chased out of a tree with her horrid marmoset." [Illustration] XXIII THE Eugenic Revolution might fairly be said to have begun with the ignominious weddings of Messrs. Reginald Willett, James Carrick, De Lancy Smith, and Alphonso W. Green. Its crisis culminated in the Long Acre riots. But the great suffragette revolution was now coming to its abrupt and predestined end; the reaction, already long overdue, gathered force with incredible rapidity and exploded from Yonkers to Coney Island, in a furious counter-revolution. The revolt of the Unfit was on at last.