Amos moved a little in his chair; and he sighed. “Well,” he drawled, “I’m watching you.” * * * * * Wint left Amos, a little later; and he walked home with a weight on his shoulders. He had counted on the Congressman; but--this was half-hearted support at best that Amos was offering. Wint was puzzled, he could not understand; and he was depressed, and worried, and unhappy. He had an impulse to get out, throw the whole matter to one side, forget it all; but on the heels of the thought, his jaw hardened and he shook his head. “No,” he said. “No; I’ll stick it out to the end.” He would have been more concerned, and he would have been thoroughly angry, if he could have heard Agnes Caretall talk to Amos when he had left. She came in to retrieve her lost slipper; and she was fuming indignantly. Old Maria Hale, setting the table for breakfast as she always did, the last thing at night, overheard a word or two of their talk. She heard Agnes exclaim: “I don’t see how you can be so calm, just because you elected him. But that doesn’t give him any right to think he can do a thing like that with me.” And she heard Amos’s slow, even voice reply: “No; it doesn’t give him any right.” “I should think you could say something,” Agnes cried. “Your own daughter!” Maria heard Amos say something about “fooling.” And Agnes retorted: “It wasn’t fooling! It was--plain insulting!” “Well, we can’t let him do that,” Amos agreed drawlingly. Then Maria departed to the kitchen and heard no more. She had paid no particular attention. The old darky lived in a world of her own. A quiet world. A world that was not far from coming to its end. She was very old. After Agnes left him and went upstairs Amos sat for a long time, very still, before the fire. His eyes were weary, and his calm face was troubled. Once he lifted his glance from the fire and saw a picture of Agnes on the mantel; and he got up and took it in his big hands. It had been taken two or three years ago; and it was very beautiful. A gay, happy face; the face of a child without cares. A good face, Amos thought. An honest one. He compared it in his thoughts with Agnes as she was now; and the trouble in his countenance deepened. After a little, he said to himself as he had said once before: “I wish her mother hadn’t ’ve died.” He put the picture slowly back on the mantel, and sat down and once more became motionless, staring into the fire. To one watching him it would have seemed in that moment that Amos, too, was very old. CHAPTER V A LOST ALLY