shivered, as if under the spell of some intuitional awe; "Mr. Boland has very great power and he mistakes his will for God's sometimes, don't you think?"
This conceit was so quaint that Henry had to smile again. This woman-girl or girl-woman—she looked eighteen but must have been twenty-four—was an odd piece certainly. She proved it now: "Someone will have to stand up against John Boland some day," she prophesied gravely, "and that someone will have to be very strong. It has seemed to me that that someone might be you."
"But why ever, Miss Marceau, should you think it might be necessary for anyone to stand up against Mr. Boland?"
"But if it ever should be necessary," his caller persisted, "as a matter of truth and justice—for someone to stand up against him . . ."
There was a charm so irresistible about the young woman's exhibition of concern, that Harrington felt compelled to humor her by entertaining this preposterous conception. "Why, it would be some fight," he smiled. "Some fight!" His lids lowered and his glance became far-away as his imagination kindled with a fighting man's love of conflict. Unconsciously he turned from Miss Marceau and gazed into the street and along the line of wharves and warehouses. Every where he looked he saw, as before, the name of Boland—Boland this and Boland that. It was written over all the town.
And the spirit of Boland went even where the name did not. It stalked along the pavements; it reigned in the lives of the people around. If any man ever did stand up to oppose John Boland in this community—one lone little man against the massed might
