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“How do you suppose he did it, Jerome?” she asked presently.

“I don’t know,” Garwood answered, “and what’s more,” he added with a dry little laugh, “I don’t want to.”

The girl’s soberness deepened as the silence in which she received his last words lengthened. Garwood glanced at her in some concern, and then he hurried on.

“Well, it came out just as he said. The next morning Piatt County threw her vote to me on the first ballot, and by the time it got down to Tazewell it was all over with Sprague; his man Simp Lewis—you’ve heard me speak of him—moved to make it unanimous, and the noise began.”

He laughed again, this time in sheer joy as he lived those hours once more.

“It lasted all morning, when we weren’t making speeches telling how we loved each other, and the party, and the dear old flag; it lasted all the way over here on the train, until I got home and saw everybody but the one woman I’d done it all for.”

“But you saw me in the crowd while you were speaking from the hotel balcony, didn’t you?”