I wanted a treasure of the rarest sort, and asked him to tell my kurumaya. I was young, and no doubt love and desire were rawly apparent in me. Perhaps that porter misunderstood me; perhaps he did n't. For years after I would have killed him at sight, anywhere, merely on the strength of the doubt."

He pushed the knife, unconsciously picked up from the table, away from him as he said it, and went on:

"My kurumaya quickly wheeled me away, off across the canal, where the fishermen sunned themselves in sampans, past Motomachi, up the hill,-you know the way,-and along the winding residence road leading to Mississippi Bay.

"The cherries were in bloom; bamboos swayed. I sat back, and crossed my legs. Flowers and miniature gardens were everywhere, as now, and those shady rocks the natives prize so.

"I was transported." He faltered. The bitterness and irony of years again fell from him, and it was easy to imagine him as he must have been, young, handsome, radiant, with a blissful future before him. "Yes, transported and in love. And I had been faithful, too, never untrue to Hilda, even in thought. Yet if desire was at work in me, was n't I a man? Anyhow, I drank in beauty at every pore, though being all the while in a sort of Nirvana."

Some hatred of the word, as he said it, brought him back to his present bitter self, from which, indeed, more than a moment's escape was impossible to him.

"My kurumaya had taken a direction away from the shopping district, but that did n't seem strange. What did it matter where I bought my gift? What did anything matter but the sunshine and enchantment, but the lure and sweetness of this precious land of the lotus, where I had come to marry Hilda?

"Well, before I knew it we were reaching the edge of the city; and again before I knew it my kurumaya had turned suddenly to the left into a little bamboo-walled garden, and had circled around a rocky pool and several

pine-trees in the center. There he stopped, hot, smiling, and panting, before a Japanese door, with its shoji thrown open. And inside"

Speech failed him again, and this time his head sank to his arms, which rested on the table. His face was twitching. When he lifted it to continue, he asked, with startling hopelessness, "Do you believe in freedom of the will?"

The question was evidently always at the bottom of his heart-and of his soul, which had been overthrown and betrayed. He did not wait for an

answer.

"Inside there stood a girl. That porter had, indeed, sent me to something rare. She was the aristocratic type of Japanese beauty, with long oval face, black hair done up in the geisha fashion, dreamy eyes-that kind. A kimono of light-rose silk hung, and fell open, from her shoulders. She was wonderful.

"She turned and smiled at me in the way Japanese women can, a submissive, irresistible smile. They get it, I suppose, through ages of wheedling their indifferent men.

"Please to come in?' she said. Then, when she saw clearly that I was taken by surprise and stood helpless before her beauty, 'Please to come up-stairs.'

"They were her only words of English, but as I followed, they seemed like a leash that at the moment I would rather have died than broken. She gave me food, sake, music on the koto, dancing-and herself.

"Yes," he went on almost fiercely, "herself. And Puritan as I was and am yet in belief, those two hours did not seem wrong, but only a part of the enchantment of the land."

This old insoluble perplexity-of desire, somehow implanted, that yet can bring ruin-was, I fancy, much in his thought; but now he dismissed it with a sentence.

"Nature's trick is to punish us most when she tempted us most. We heard a sudden noise of voices down-stairs, and what seemed to be terrified denials from several inmates of the house. Then there were feet on the stairs, the shoji of our room were thrown open,

Hilda had turned to stone. She would not see or hear him, giving as a reason that unfaithfulness at the moment of marriage meant certain unfaithfulness afterward.

He had written pages of pleas for three months; his letters always came back. Oh, she was hard, frozen cruel, Hilda was, as only the proud can be. And then in six months she had married she who had scorned marriage except for love!

He had gone away to Shanghai and into wild company. From Shanghai he went to Java and put the little money he had left in a coffee concern, which failed.

Then malaria had attacked him. He was for months in a Surabaya hospital, friendless and moneyless. When he got up he was too done for to work; and he wanted liquor, wanted it badly, to forget.

Only a step remained from that to becoming a beach-comber, to drifting here, there, anywhere, helped from time to time by a little money borrowed, begged, or earned; for he would not appeal to his people. Then he had come back to Yokohama with the promise in a month's time of a job. It was a last chance for him. An old friend was on the way from San Francisco, one who might help him.

I heard him out, and ordered more whisky, loath as I was to do so. When he had drunk it at a gulp, I could speak.

"I don't know," I said, "whether character is destiny, as we 've heard it contended, but destiny is often enough hell. And as it has been so for you, Lowry, I don't mind saying I 'm sorry. In fact, as I 'm a man myself, you have as much of my sympathy in this matter as Mrs. Neilson. Nevertheless, you must leave Yokohama."

He took this, looking hard at me, and wiping his drink-swollen lips in the habitual way. An understanding of man to man passed slowly between us.

He rose silently and looked around the room, as if not only Yokohama streets, but indeed the whole world, were stark prison-walls for him. Then his gaze went far away out the window, past the ships and the sea, to another world he had long lost sight of the world of noblesse oblige and of the ideals to which he had been bred.

The struggle which took place in him was brief. Perhaps he had suffered too much to keep it up long. Perhaps, as I am inclined to think, the result was a clear spiritual triumph for him.

"Yes," he said and smiled miserably, sardonically, as when he had first met me, "I must go. Chances are only for those who don't need a chance. And you may tell Hilda," he added, with a tinge of scorn concealing the gallantry of what seemed to him a lie, "that she was right. Hilda, you know, always liked to be right."

This was his last submission. The sense of wrong he had suffered was the one thing he could oppose to his unforgetable sense of degradation; it was his ballast against the reelings of despair.

"I will tell her," I said.

He took up his hat, offered me his hand, hesitantly, and, after I had grasped it, went out.

I SAT smoking till dusk, and after dinner went to see Hilda. The rain had ceased. The moon was damnably haunting. It poured phosphorescent silver on the temples, where crimson lanterns swung; on shadowy gateposts, whose ideographs, I recalled, seemed to Lowry like writhing hellserpents; on the branches of bamboo and pine; and on the mystery of the

sea.

Hilda, herself again, was expecting me, in manner and attire cool, handsome, complete. It was fascinating, partly, I believe, because the uncertainty of life at sea made the certainty that she would always be thus presentable most tempting.

We walked in the garden that I might smoke, or perhaps that she might throw over her shoulders a rarely embroidered mandarin coat of irresistible hue. I was given an account of the day at the embassy, begun with regret that I had missed it, but related with the satisfaction and assuredness of one who has recently been soothed by admiration and flattery.

Yet flattery had not proved a complete anodyne to the encounter of the morning it only covered insecurity. I could see that. And she was little pleased with the silence I was determined to keep until she asked for what she most wished to hear.

"Well?" she said at length, laying an intimate hand for the first time on my arm.

The touch was crucial. Twentyfour hours before it would have brought ardent avowal to my lips. Now I let it rest there without seeming to consider the caress or even to be aware of it.

"Oh, he 's going away," I said, as if that was all that was needed.

"That 's decent, at least," she answered, withdrawing the touch, at which, perversely enough, I was piqued and fretted.

"Yes, he'll go," I averred. "I fancy you'll not be bothered again. He left you a message."

My cigar had gone out. I lit it again indifferently, getting a rich glimpse of her face as I did so.

"He asked me to tell you," I said slowly, "that you were right."

I felt her tremble, as if the words had withdrawn from her some invisible support. But immediately she straightened. It may have been with determination, but I was in a mood to see only self-satisfaction.

Yes, I thought, Hilda likes to be right; and no doubt she had been in dealing with Lowry. Almost any fine woman would have taken the same course. Yet the certainty of having been right at that most critical moment would, it seemed to me, harden the last tenderness in her; for she was, she was, hard.

I finished my cigar, the guilty tenth that day, and prepared to take leave. "When shall I see you again?" she asked, walking with me to the gate.

It was uncertain, I replied, as I had to go to Tokio to-morrow, and perhaps directly from there to Kobe to join my ship. It had been charming to see her. Would she be here when I next re

turned? If so, I must see more of her, much more.

At the gate we said good-by, she puzzled and perhaps a little pained. But not with self-suspicion, I sneered to myself, for to those who like being right as much as Hilda self-suspicion is scarcely a habit.

Two days later I sailed from Kobe. Six months ago I met an old friend of the Neilsons at the club in Shanghai. He had evidently known them well, and I admit that I listened hungrily to his talk of them.

They had never hit it off together, it seemed, though it was hard to say just why. She had always been charming in her manner toward Neilson, perfect, and their home was all it should be. Only, something was missing.

His opinion was that she secretly regarded her marriage a mistake, and would never marry again; perhaps because she was in love, and always had been, with a chap named Lowry, to whom she had been engaged before she met Neilson.

With an instant sinking of the heart I felt that he was right, and at the same time I knew that I loved her, knew it certainly. Yet on the night I gave her Lowry's message might I not have changed her? She had laid her hand on my arm as if

I put the thought away, rose, said good night, and went to my ship.

VII. THE LIBERAL LEADERSHIP

FOR a quarter of a century after Confederation, as for many years before it, the Conservative party of Canada followed a single leader. Never in Canada's history, and rarely in the annals of any other country, has any man dominated a great political party through so long a term as has John A. Macdonald. His leadership was not wholly unquestioned. At times severe illness, at others inat

tention to duties, and again the seemingly hopeless load of obloquy and discredit following the revelations of the Pacific scandal threatened his hold. Yet never for long. Macdonald's vast patience and resource, his uncanny knowledge of men and the motives that moved them, his grip on the popular imagination not less for his human failings than for his statesman's virtues, the mistakes of his opponents, or the weakness of his rivals, brought the party humbly and gratefully back to the incomparable leader. He was primarily an Ontario man, and each of the other provinces had its own leader, Cartier or Langevin, Tupper, Tilley; but the system of dual premiership which had marked the Union disappeared under Confederation, and the prime minister was really first. As year after year went by, and "John A." still reigned, his luck became legendary and his prestige invincible.

The Liberal party had no such good fortune. It had not one chief, but many. Leader after leader took up the task of vanquishing Sir John, and leader after leader laid it down again. Brown, Mackenzie, Blake, in turn failed, or found success but momentary, and Laurier won through to power only after his

great rival had passed from the scene. All were men of outstanding personal force, of unquestioned sincerity, and of devotion to their country's good, endowed with many of the qualities that stir a people's and a party's loyalty. Brown and Blake and Laurier had broad constructive vision and a statesmanlike grasp of the wider issues of politics, and if Brown did not wholly despise the arts of the practical politician, Mackenzie and Blake, as well as their successor, scorned corruption and fought it whether in the ranks in front or in the ranks behind them. Yet in the first thirty years of Confederation the Liberals held power for five years, and the Conservatives for five and twenty.

In so far as the Conservatives owed their victories to the people's belief that they were more national-minded, more positive and optimistic in their policies, whether of trade development or of railway building, there might be room for dispute, but none for despair. In so far as they owed their fortune to a greater readiness to grant or to promise favors to a person or a class at public cost, or to gerrymander a riding or a province, it was not surprising that many observers grew doubtful of democracy. There is more than the loser's disappointment in Mackenzie's words to a friend a few days after his defeat in 1878.

The recent verdict has shaken my confidence in the general soundness of public opinion and has given cause to fear that an upright administration of public affairs will not be appreciated by the mass of the people. If political criminals and political chicanery are to be preferred to such a course as we pursued, the outlook is an alarming one.