benefit it was necessary to play a part, Wint would have stiffened his resolution and laughed at the situation. But he could not play a part that would deceive himself. Alone in the dingy bedroom in that disreputable place, he burned with shame and tortured pride.

He began to fit together the pieces of the puzzle. He never doubted that it was true the voters had elected him. There had been truth in Jack Routt’s eyes the night before, truth and a sort of triumph. Routt was a good fellow and a true friend; and he rejoiced, no doubt, that Wint had been so honored. Wint, thinking this, grimaced. He knew, without explanations, that his election was a joke; a colossal joke in the first place upon his father, and a grim jest at his own expense. He could imagine the cackling mirth of those who had engineered the thing; and this laughter that he seemed to hear lashed his ears. 

He flung himself over on his face and buried his head in his arms and tried to think. He was full of rebellion. He would go away, leave this place, never return….

After a time, he lifted his head and moved his body and sat up on the bed, his feet on the floor. He sat up and looked about him and shuddered in a sick way. The light of day made this room more hideous than it had been by lamplight. The shattered lamp lay in the grate, and there was a charred place on the floor near the hearth, where the oil had burned itself out, when Wint threw down the lamp the night before. Above the mantel hung the cracked mirror. In it from where he sat, Wint could see a distorted reflection of the ceiling of the room, and an angle of the wall. There had once been paper on this wall, and it had been cracked by the shrinking of the plaster, and picked away by casual fingers, and here and there it hung in short, ragged strips. The bare floor was unclean; the chair near the bed where Wint’s two shoes now reposed was decrepit and lacked paint. One door of the big wardrobe hung awkwardly from weakened hinges. It was a little ajar, and Wint could see a disorder of rubbish inside. On the floor near the chair lay his hat and coat and one sock, where he had dropped them when he had come here and stumbled drunkenly to bed. 

He held his head in his hands, and his fingers clenched in his crisp hair. 

For some time, his senses had been catching hints of life in the building below him. The smell of burning grease had come up the stairs from the kitchen; and the grumble of voices now and then upraised in protest or abuse had reached his ears. Once he heard, from a distance and 

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