Читать книгу The 13th District. A Story of a Candidate онлайн

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“Now you must tell me all about it,” she said. “The newspapers are so unsatisfactory, and you know I’ve only had the one little note you wrote me Wednesday night—when you thought you were beaten.”

They laughed, now that they could do so with impunity, at the danger he had been in so short a time before.

“Well,” he began, “it was a close shave, after all. If it hadn’t been for Jim Rankin I’d have come home to-night beaten, and there wouldn’t have been any band or any carriage or any crowd to greet me—as Rankin reminded me this afternoon when I was near bursting at the reception I did get.” He laughed, but the laugh had a tinge of bitterness.

“I would have been there,” she said simply.

“If I’d been beaten?”

“Yes.”

“I missed you this afternoon,” he said. “I looked for you everywhere.”

“There were enough there, weren’t there?”

“No, not quite,” he said; “the crowd lacked one, just one.” He spoke with a little injury in his tone. And the girl, with her quick apperception of it, said:

“I wanted you all to myself, dear. I can give you part of the time to the public—but I can’t share you.” She said this in the pride of a new conception of Garwood that had just come to her—a conception of him as a public man, sacrificing himself for the people. Garwood himself instantly shared the conception.