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 me, and, unable to, left me listening to the cheep of birds and the echo of an airplane motor from across the lake. Whose? I wondered with total inconsequence.

What drummed in my brain was that this light, lovely girl was trapped in this business of Bane with which she, herself, had had no direct concern, until through her father it enmeshed and ensnared her far more hopelessly and helplessly than it held Pete and me. Her father's name ran familiarly to me; a politician, as she had said, in power in his party.

"Father heard of him at the time," she said to me. "It was in the papers, of course; for Harry had to be taken to a sanitarium on that election night. Father felt—terribly."

She stopped and struggled in the silence to think it out. "But he didn't feel to blame. I didn't feel him—to blame. Pardons are part of politics; they have to be; they're necessary; they're right—some of them anyway." Desperately she labored against her own honesty to be loyal to her father in his defense. "It seemed only a sort of frightful accident that happened to Harry Bane. We did every-