like her own. There must be a certain harmony, he knew, between the minds of the married to insure happiness. If he had loved her, he might have tried to mould her plastic mind after his own; but he was not in love. The surface of his affections had been rippled, its depths were unstirred. That it might be otherwise with her never entered his mind; if it had, he would have reasoned that as he had escaped, why should she be more impressionable? The Judge forgot the years that lay between them. His heart was in the mellowed summer, hers, in the budding springtime.

Howe escorted Mrs. Boyd that afternoon, for her husband, always shy of society, had abandoned her, at the last moment, on the plea of having to take Mrs. Delgare for a drive. As was customary, Mrs. Boyd had to fall back on the company of the Judge, and he, thinking how agreeable it would have been to himself if the arrangement were reversed, bowed to the whims of his wilful host, and, as if it were the highest pleasure of his life, set forth for the fashionable gathering at, Mrs. Allison's. As soon as she could, that lady drew the Judge apart from the brilliant throng to pour into his ears the intelligence of her affliction. His surprise and regret were : sincere. He felt convinced that the atmosphere of the world of art was not the best for Cora. The recklessness of which he had seen hints in her nature, needed the hand of the daily commonplace to hold in proper restraint. His familiarity with American cities and his European travels, led him to realize that Mrs. Allison had graver cause than she believed, to view the decision of her niece as a most dismal affair.

"I have no influence over her," she confided. "She is of age-but that is an indifferent matter, as her father's will left her in immediate possession of her for

tune, and our guardianship was merely nominal."

"But Mr. Allison-" began the Judge, when she interrupted him with a deprecatory gesture.

"Mr. Allison!" she exclaimed. "If he saw that his objecting words brought tears to her eyes, he would kiss them away and tell her to do as she pleased. Of course, he doesn't like it, but-you know his nature. It all falls on me."

Her voice dropped a little wearily, and, despite her still pretty face and rich costume, she looked aged; and as the Judge recalled how all through her life things had fallen on her to do, or go undone, he experienced sympathy for this woman, with the first note of defeat in her tones.

"Is there anything I can do, Mrs. Allison?" he inquired, kindly. "If so, I beg you to command my services."

"Will you speak to Cora? She may heed your words."

He recalled the mocking light he had met from that young lady's eyes, on Saturday, and said:

"I fear not. She treats me with a scorn but lightly veiled, of late." "Of late?" she asked, warily.

"Yes," he said, with a smile. "Once she was friendly."

"Whose fault is it that she is not friendly still?" asked she, tapping him playfully on the shoulder with her fan. But before surprise had time to overtake him, she added: "I think you have an influence over her. I think if you will only go to her, in the old friendly attitude, and tell her that the act she contemplates is wrong-ruinous, in fact! -that she will heed you and be guided by your advice."

Howe seldom permitted himself to be surprised out of his habitual quietude of mind, and, keen at piercing words to find their motive, he smiled at her finesse.

"You flatter me, in thinking that I possess any influence over the mind of your charming niece," he said, and as his inscrutable eyes met hers, they fell to her fan. As if the feathers gave her boldness, she again looked up.

"Are you certain of that, Judge?" she asked pointedly, but a certain expression on his face made her add, hastily: "A friend always has influence on the mind. of his friend."

"We shall see the extent of the influence of my friendship with Miss Cora," he said, easily, and as they moved from the alcove in which they had stood, Mrs. Allison was convinced that she had blundered.

Cora was standing at the rear of the long room, with a crowd of young friends surrounding her. Their voices and laughter made a silvery din. It was a sound that ever lighted Howe's face with its tenderest smile. He loved youth and made it an object to mix with it freely and fully. He was the comrade of the boy in his teens as well as of the young man, and half the schoolgirls of the town claimed him as their beau. Now, approaching the crowd, he saw only Cora, and he was newly inspired by her exquisite beauty. The warmth of the atmosphere and the excitement had deepened the peach-tint of her cheeks and made brighter the scarlet on her lips. As she stood there, and Mrs. Allison's suggestive words recurred to him, he wondered if he were a fool to let pass the golden opportunity of winning that lovely woman. While he repudiated the insinuation of Mrs. Allison's remarks, could she not be brought to love him? In the wearing of his future high honors, would she not share them royally? In the gathering of the nation's beauty at Washington, would she not shine among them like a star? But between him and her, memory now slipped in the face of Mrs. Delgare. Instead of this room, with its

lights and music and gay company, he saw the long white turnpike, along which she was then being driven by Jasper Boyd.

At his approach, the group divided and, singly or together, drifted elsewhere, until he found himself alone with Cora. She sank into a chair, and he took a seat near her.

"You have come from Aunt?" she said. The mocking light was in her eyes, and it occurred to him that it was not thus Cora's eyes were wont to meet his. "You have come from Aunt," she repeated. "She has asked you to try to dissuade me from studying art, and you have promised to do so. It's friendship's labor lost, my dear sir!"

There was a gleam in her eyes that might have proved dangerous to another, because of the manlike desire to extinguish it, and set one different in its place; but Howe's soft smile brightened his noble face, and he said, simply: "Yes, Cora, I have come from your aunt. Will you listen to me?”

Her eyes dropped from his. All her proud nature went down before the gentle-mannered man. She could have flung herself at his feet in this swift abandonment of feeling.

"I do not think what you contemplate is right-that is, right for you. I think you should stay here," he said.

She lifted her lids. He thought that he had never seen such glory in a woman's eyes. His soul bowed before it. "Why should I stay?" she asked, softly.

That which had prompted his soul's reverence now prompted him to say, "Because I need you!" It almost forced the words from his lips. Startled, shocked at this undreamed of power working against his known desire, the Judge replied to her in platitudes of her duty to her family and position. The glory faded under his eyes. He seemed. to look upon a great sea of inky black

ness before the light of scorn had again been flashed from the blue windows of her soul.

"As I said before, your labors in my aunt's behalf are in vain. I intend studying art." Others were approaching, and she added, with a mocking little laugh, "Won't you some time let me paint your portrait? I should like to immortalize my name, in the picture of our Kentucky Bayard.”

The tone left Howe doubtful if compliment or the contrary were meant.

Cora might have meant her concluding words as a dismissal; but, with the privilege of ancient friendship, he chose not so to regard it. Supposing that they had interrupted a tete-a-tete agreeable to both, the guests after a few minutes moved away, and she must, perforce, return to her place. While she had been attending to her duties as hostess, he had been regarding her in the new light which she had, that afternoon, thrown on her character. There was more depth to her nature than he had imagined. He asked himself if he really

knew her at all.

"Cora," he began, as she took her chair, "you are young-"

"I am twenty-one," she interrupted. "Twenty-one is now regarded as very young," he said. "In this age of intricate problems and extensive knowledge, it is wisely conceded that men and women require a longer period of time than formerly to become master of the situation. And your mode of living has been conducive to immaturity. A sheltered childhood and girlhood, as yours happily have been, have left you younger at that age than one less fortunate. You do not know the world—”

"Then it is time I am learning," she said, quietly.

"What will you gain by the knowledge it can give you?"

"Knowledge is power," she quoted lightly.

He made a gesture, half-impatiently. "Why won't you meet an argument seriously?" he asked.

"Because I am so childish, I daresay," she retorted.

"Exactly!"

He had drawn himself

up in his chair. The fire was lighting in his quiet eyes, and it threw its flashes over the dark beauty of his face. "Exactly!" he repeated, "and in nothing do you show your childishness so much as in this intention of yours to begin the study of art. You have not genius, nor talent of any high order, for if you had, it would have set you to drawing pictures on your slate when you should have been working sums, and instead of thinking of entering a School of Design at twenty-one, you would be eating your heart out over your failure to get your paintings accepted by the Academy. If you possessed the divine gift, you would not have waited for ennui or the Bohemianism of a silly boy to drive you into the world of art. Because you are going from no supreme motive, gives me, and all your friends, concern. You know nothing of the trials of an art student's life; you know nothing of the influence, which, aiming to overthrow the conventionalities, weakens the moralities, or, at least, tends to lessen their importance. Artists call this freedom of view, Bohemianism, and assert that it is not only essential to art, but produces a loftier ideal of manhood and womanhood; and hold that this liberty of the art world is less harmful to morals than the restraint of the social world. I am not claiming for society the purity which it ought to possess, but I do claim. that the recognized standards of propriety that govern it, hedge it in, are necessary in all intercourse, social, artistic or business, between men and women. 'Bonhomie' does not produce the best relationship of the sexes. The woman loses something of her respect

for the man; the man loses all his reverence for the woman."

"You belong to the old school of thought as well as of politics, Judge," she replied.

"Yes, both are old, old as the dawn of civilization," he said, gravely. "Grecian political laws placed power in the hands of the wise men, but permitted a final appeal from their opinion to the opinion of the people; and Grecian manners circumscribed the social relations to a narrow domain."

"What was the result? Where is Greece to-day?" she asked, flippantly.

"The result was a light set upon the steeps of Helicon whose beams will reach to the farthest point of time; and Greece lives to-day in our laws, our philosophy and our manners. CivilizaCivilization has not improved on the art of Greece, nor her literature, nor her philosophy, nor her politics, nor her manners; nor can it!" Dropping the warmth from his voice, he added: "But all this is foreign to our subject."

"I believe," she said-for, as he had gained in intensity she had grown indifferent, if she could be indifferent when he was the speaker-"I believe that you were warning me against the dangers that men and women encounter, in any position of life, when the strict regulations of society are removed. In other words, that we need commandments to keep us good."

She paused with the flicker of a smile in the tail of her blue eyes.

"Now," she continued, "I don't think so. I think I could be a lady in the Latin Quarter, and a good woman if the Jews had never recovered their tablets of stone from their conquerors; and we'll not discuss that. Feeling this way, you see (or can you see it, who know so little of me, or any woman's nature?) that there is a certain indescribable pleasure in confronting that life, with its supposed dangers. It's like the feeling

that takes you when you're skating on thin ice. When we were children, I enjoyed nothing more than to stand on a bank, at the very edge, until I felt it beginning to crumble under my feet, then jump across the water."

"Some do not jump quite in time," he suggested.

"I know it," she assented. "Ray never did, and either fell, or, trying to jump, landed in the branch. Alice would stand back where there was no danger of the bank giving way; but sometimes she was too cautious, and sprang into the middle of the water. It all depends on knowing the exact moment to jump. I always knew it, and always enjoyed the sensation which the proximity to danger gives. I know what was in the poet's mind, when he wrote:

"Let us like the bird for a moment alight Upon branches too frail to uphold, Who feels tremble the bough, though he sings with delight,

Knowing well he has wings to unfold.'"

The bold spirit, secure as a hawk mounting into the blue, flashed through her voice as she recited the lines, and Allen Howe felt his pulses quickened by the first unworthy thought, perchance, that had ever crossed his mind about virtuous womanhood. He flung it from him as he would have thrown off an asp, and the red of shame crept into his brow. He rose instantly. But as he looked down on the girl, so ignorant of what her unconscious beauty and abandon could inspire, and fully as ignorant of her own nature, he said, slowly:

"Cora, let one almost old enough to be your father give you a piece of counsel: Never speak to any man as you have now spoken to me. A woman's safety lies in her weakness, real or presumed. The daring bird is the one that the marksman loves to bring down."

Her face grew scarlet under his words. She tried to make a haughty reply but the words choked her.

She half yielded to the tenderness of voice and face; then, seeing what that course, after his warning, would seem to imply, she said slowly, as she arose:

"Thank you, Judge Howe, for your advice! Part of it I cannot take; part of it I shall remember, to test it. Never fear but I'll unfold my wings at the right instant, and your marksman's shot will go under my feet."

growth of years. The conservatives would not fight under such a banner as Goebel Democracy, and they withdrew; those who could not bring themselves to join, even temporarily, with a creed so detested as Republicanism, formed a party wing which possessed all the weakness of overthrown right.

The tragic death of Goebel, with the scepter of supreme rule in his grasp, alone saved Kentucky for Democracy.

turned away.

IV.

Hitherto, Howe had had the political field to himself. With the nomination by his party secured, he might reasonably expect to take his seat, as the Republican element was not ordinarily strong enough to elect its representative. But into the Democratic politics of Kentucky there had been injected a spirit entirely foreign to it, absolutely and forever opposed to its tenets and creed. This old Democracy is, without doubt, the safest expression for a Republican form of government, and, while it is necessary for the preservation of its character to be sometimes set out of power, it should possess that strength within itself to make it serve as a strong check on the deleterious tendency of the opposing political creed. Change of expression is inevitable, but that change should be a steady growth toward a higher sphere, and not a falling into division, if not actual decay, as is the present aspect of the party of Andrew Jackson.

Nowhere, perhaps, has it felt such dismemberment as in Kentucky. By determinedly thrusting himself into the party and ambitiously seizing its leadership, William Goebel, that Napoleon of Kentucky statesmanship, cut Democracy in twain, in the state of his adoption. But revolutions must completely over

thinking men, however intense might be their loyalty to their leader; perhaps their leader himself, as he lingered at the portals of death, amid the scenes of his triumph and his overthrow, also recognized it, and it called forth his immortal farewell to his followers. By a natural sequence, Caesar living becomes a patriot dead. There followed a political tumult which swept all sense of right and justice from the minds of men.

Reason seemed to have fled her throne. Goebel became the Washington of Democracy, and all who had opposed him were its Arnolds. Men who had fought for Democratic principles on a

hundred

Southern battle-fields, and whose devotion to it, in the following years of peace, was untainted, were ranked as traitors, cowards, and deserters; while the scoundrel whose party was self and whose god was greed was hailed as its su, porter, if he had followed Goebel's standard. Some of the highest offices were held by men whose sole claim to recognition by their party was their Goebelism.

Of course, reaction followed. The Legislature that, right or wrong, set Goebel in office, effected a change in his election law, which was a direct blow at the purity of the ballot whose sacredness Democracy has tried to maintain. But still his memory clung to the minds of men, and was nurtured by their hatred of Republicans, whose conduct, as