His strength was without strain, the strength that is effortless, the strength of laughter. He had taken her to him suddenly, and she dwelt in it, though resisting; something ecstatic, even in holding out.... She heard voices in herself and faces flashed through her mind--Cobden’s, Fanny Gallup’s--but her arms and shoulders and breast knew a terrible sweetness from his strength. It wasn’t hateful. It was like her own boy, not a stranger. His laughing face was nearer. It was coming to hers. In the dark she could see it, eyes and eyelids, curving nostrils and laughing lips. She knew something would die in her when it touched ... that she was dying now of the slowness of its coming. She ceased to struggle, and all that she had known and been arose within her to meet his lips. * * * * * She was on the second flight of stairs. She almost prayed that Fanny’s door would not open. She wanted to be in her own little room, the smaller the better to-night--no touch or voice upon her. The key turned in her trembling hand. She was safe, the door locked again. She stood in the dark. Her lips moved audibly: “Am I--is it because I am my father’s child?” XXII A LETTER FROM PIDGE RICHARD COBDEN moved up and down the Near East for a long time, looking for the men they had told him about in school and college--the men who make history, and are said to contain in themselves the greatness of their race. He sailed with sailors, talked with the diploma-ed talkers, rode with soldiers. He found men who would do for their countries what they wouldn’t do for themselves, but the energy of their fidelity to their countries was balanced by their enmity toward other countries. They gave themselves to the heresy of fighting one part of the human family for the alleged enhancement of another. It took Dicky a long time to change the brain tracks made in school and college, that the names of history might _not_ be the names of men who walked with God, whose intellects pained from sheer power. Nor was he spared from the suspicion in all his discoveries, that he was the one who was wrong, that he had become softly insane in the midst of new ideas. * * * * *