She wagged her old head, comforted and grinning. “I guess you won’t forgit,” she told herself. And after a moment: “Will you be wanting some breakfast?” Wint stroked the ears of Muldoon. “No,” he said. “No.” And he added thoughtfully: “Thank you very much.” “That’s all right, deary,” she assured him, and so turned at last and went haltingly down the stairs. When the woman was gone, Wint sat very still for a space, staring at the empty doorway, thinking. Muldoon was on his lap, and Wint forgot the dog, although his hand still played automatically with Muldoon’s ears. The dog was for a time content with this, moving its head now and then under Wint’s hand to get full value from his caresses; but by and by it became conscious of his abstraction, and looked up into his face, and wriggled, and at last muzzled a cold nose under his chin and nudged upward against Wint’s jaw until Wint emerged from his absorption and laughed and caught Muldoon’s head in his hands and shook it. “There, boy,” he whispered. “D’you think I’d forgotten you? No fear, Muldoon.” Having aroused his master, Muldoon in his turn decided to feign abstraction. He lay down, ostentatiously, across Wint’s knees, and he pillowed his muzzle on his forepaws and lay there with eyes rolling up in spite of himself to watch Wint’s face. Wint cupped the dog’s lower jaw in his right hand and shook it gently. “What are they saying about me uptown, Muldoon?” he asked. The dog moved its head, then fell into a motionless pose again. Wint bent over it, whispering, half to Muldoon and half to himself. “Laughing, of course,” he said softly. “Laughing! The joke of years!” He smiled grimly. “Tough on dad. He’d set his heart on this Mayor business.” He looked across to the window, and his eyes hardened. “They meant it as much as a joke on me as on father,” he reminded himself, and his eyes burned. He wondered how the plan had been carried through. Caretall and Gergue must have had their hand in it; they had probably united with V. R. Kite. It would be reasonably easy, he knew. His father had had no real popularity. Winthrop Chase, Senior, was not a likable man. He was not a vote getter. There was a self-conscious condescension about his good-fellowship. Wint had never paid any great attention to local politics. He wondered idly what a Mayor had to do. He tried to remember some of the things Mayors had done in the past; and he found his only knowledge of the subject concerned with a Hallowe’en prank as a result of which he and two others had been haled before the Mayor’s court and badly frightened. “He must do something besides that,” he assured himself. “But Lord--I couldn’t even do that.”