Emmet's face darkened. "I had it out with Bat Quayle this morning and turned him down hard. He 'll get back at me sooner or later. But that is n't what I came up to see you about. The fact is, I 'm in trouble." Leigh glanced tentatively at the sheets of paper on his table, covered with unfinished calculations, and hesitated; but his visitor's manner implied an urgent need. "If I can be of any help to you"--he suggested. "I'm not so sure of that," Emmet answered gloomily, "as that I want to tell some one what an awful fool I 've made of myself." "There are others," Leigh replied, with a bitter grin. "I know a triple-expansion ass not a hundred miles from here; so fire away." Emmet went over to the brasier and warmed his hands, as if embarrassed for words with which to begin. Leigh fumbled in the pocket of his greatcoat and produced his pipe, then drawing up his chair opposite, he sat down to listen. No premonition came to him at that moment that the story his visitor had to tell in any way concerned himself, or would deepen the even melancholy of his present days. He settled himself comfortably, with a sense of justifiable relaxation from toil. The troubles of another might arouse his intellectual sympathy, but they could add no burden to his heart. He even experienced a pleasurable curiosity. Emmet was to some degree a mysterious character to him, though he no longer thought of him in connection with Felicity. Her departure from Warwick had put an end to that suspicion, and made it something of which he was ashamed. He divined indeed that the trouble concerned a woman, but not the woman who had gone away with such evident indifference to any man in Warwick. "Well, Emmet," he said at last, "here I am, all ears. Perhaps it will help you to a beginning if I suggest that there's a woman somewhere at the bottom of the trouble." The other placed his chair snugly in the corner, buried his hands deep in his pockets, and looked at the brasier with a fixed stare. "It's not one woman," he began, with a sensible effort, "it's two. I don't know any better way to give you an idea of the tangle I've gotten myself into than by going back to the beginning of the story. About five years ago, I hadn't any more idea of going into politics than you have now. I was playing baseball in the summer and running a car in winter, and saving my money. My parents were both dead, and I was thinking that it was pretty near time for me to get married. I was never one to throw away my money with the boys,--it came too hard,--I didn't even smoke or drink, and"-- "That's a bad beginning," Leigh interrupted, shaking his head with mock seriousness. "No small vices--women."