"It's like a home to me," he confessed, his voice uncertain. "It's like a home." "And some call you hard!" Mrs. Hilliard extended both plump hands to him. "How they misjudge you." "Everybody misjudges me, Cora," Shelby declared, not backward in manual demonstration himself; "everybody but you." The lady released herself adroitly, and fluttered the music at a piano just beyond the half-drawn portiere of the adjoining room. "Shall I play?" she asked. Shelby nodded like a sultan from his cushions. "Ragtime," he directed. "Something with a tune." The other woman had surfeited him with classicalities. He built air castles as he watched and listened; fabrics furnished after the manner of the Hilliard home and peopled by two kindred souls. If this insidious luxury were his--the warmth, ease, leisure, Cora! He considered the turn of her neck, her profile, the famous shoulders, now clothed yet not concealed. She was handsome still; ripe, but not over-ripe, ambitious, capable. They were singularly congenial, he and she. He could have blundered worse than in marrying her, had not burly Joe forestalled. _He_--inappreciative hulk!--was no fit mate for her. She needed sympathy, cooeperation, the fellowship of her mind's true complement: in fine, himself. If the other woman should not--if Joe--! He clipped the revery of its conclusion. In that evening's long intimacy--how long or how intimate neither realized till afterward--the man bared his financial necessity. "God knows why I blab this," he ended. "I've told nobody else the whole truth, not even Bowers." She lagged short of his meaning at first. "But you'll have plenty in time," she said. "There will be your congressional salary and all the new opportunities." "Without money I may never draw that salary." "You don't mean you'll fail! You don't mean that, Ross?" He bowed gravely. "But it's impossible. Why, everybody will vote for you--almost everybody. Joe alone will give you two hundred votes." "It will require more than Little Poland's good-will to elect me," he smiled grimly. "You must _buy_ votes?" "Yes." "And you have nothing?" "At this moment I haven't enough ready cash to give me a decent burial." "Don't speak like that." She rose impulsively, and unlocked a cabinet in the chimneypiece. "Here is a little--not much--a hundred dollars perhaps. I want you to take it; it's mine--some of my allowance. I want to give it to the party. And there's more. I've a mortgage--my very own. You shall have that too--for the party." Shelby leaped to his feet as she thrust the bills in his hands. "My God, Cora," he cried, "I can't take this--your pin money!" She caught the notes from his protesting fingers and forced them into his nearest pocket. "You shall," she pleaded; "you shall--for the party." He seized her hands and bent to meet her eyes.