game, the trick that should give over to your grasp the right handle at last. This was that every man, once knowing he was a prisoner, should laugh at his fetters and break them by his own muscle. "The trouble is," he said, at breakfast, when Mary Nellen was bringing in the waffles, "we're all such liars." The colonel sat there in a mild peaceableness, quite another man under the tan of his honest intimacy with the sun. He had been up hoeing an hour before breakfast, and helped himself to waffles liberally, while Mary Nellen looked, with all her intellectual aspirations in her eyes, at Jeff. "No, no," said the colonel. He was conscious of very kindly feelings within himself, and believed in nearly everybody but Esther. She, he thought, might have a chance of salvation if she could be reborn, physically hideous, into a world obtuse to her. "Liars!" said Jeff mildly. "We're doing the things we're expected to do, righteous or not. And we're saying the things we don't believe." "That's nothing but kindness," said the colonel. Mary Nellen made a pretence of business at the side table, and listened greedily. She would take what she had gathered to the kitchen and discuss it to rags. She found the atmosphere very stimulating. "If I asked Lydia here whether she found my hair thin, Lydia would say she thought it beautiful hair, wouldn't you, Lyddy? She couldn't in decency tell me I'm as bald as a rat." "It is beautiful," said Lydia. "It doesn't need to be thick." Jeff had refused waffles. He thrust his hands in his pockets and leaned back, regarding his father with a smile. The lines in his face, Lydia thought, fascinated, were smoothed out, all but the channels in the forehead and the cleft between his brows. That last would never go. "I am simply," said Jeff, "so tickled I can hardly contain myself. I have discovered something." "What?" said Lydia. "The world," said Jeff. "Here it is. It's mine. I can have it to play with. It's yours. You can play, too. So can that black-eyed army Madame Beattie has mobilised. So can she." Anne was looking at him in a serious anxiety. "With conditions as they are--" said she, and Jeff interrupted her without scruple. "That's the point. With conditions as they are, we've got to dig into things and mine out pleasures, and shake them in the faces of the mob and the mob will follow us." The colonel had ceased eating waffles. His thin hand, not so delicate now that it had learned the touch of toil, trembled a little as it held his fork. "Jeff," said he, "what do you want to do?" "I want," said Jeff, "to keep this town out of the clutch of Weedie Moore." "You can't do it. Not so long as Amabel is backing him. She's got unlimited cash, and she thinks he's God Almighty and she wants him to be mayor." "It's a far cry," said Jeff, "from God Almighty to mayor. But Alston Choate is going to be nominated for mayor, and he's going to get it." "He won't take it," said Anne impulsively, and bit her lip.