eye.

"What's your diagnosis?" he asked. "Superannuated--unfit for duty
--unable to cope with the situation ready to be superseded? Is that about
it?"

To say that Senator Whitredge was startled and uncomfortable would be to
put his case mildly. He had never before seen Mr. Vane in this mood.

"Ha-ha!" he laughed; "the years are coming over us a little, aren't they?
But I guess it isn't quite time for the youngsters to step in yet."

"No, Whitredge," said Mr. Vane, slowly, without taking his eye from the
senator's, "and it won't be until this convention is over. Do you
understand?"

"That's the first good news I've heard this morning," said the senator,
with the uneasy feeling that, in some miraculous way, the Honourable
Hilary had read the superseding orders from highest authority through his
pocket.

"You may take it as good news or bad news, as you please, but it's a
fact. And now I want 'YOU' to tell Ridout that I wish to see him again,
and to bring in Doby, who is to be chairman of the convention."

"Certainly," assented the senator, with alacrity, as he started for the
door. Then he turned. "I'm glad to see you're all right, Vane," he added;
"I'd heard that you were a little under the weather--a bilious attack on
account of the heat--that's all I meant." He did not wait for an answer,
nor would he have got one. And he found Mr. Ridout in the hall.

"Well?" said the lawyer, expectantly, and looking with some curiosity at
the senator's face.

"Well," said Mr. Whitredge, with marked impatience, "he wants to see you
right away."

All day long Hilary Vane held conference in Number Seven, and at six
o'clock sent a request that the Honourable Adam visit him. The Honourable
Adam would not come; and the fact leaked out--through the Honourable
Adam.

"He's mad clean through," reported the Honourable Elisha Jane, to whose
tact and diplomacy the mission had been confided. "He said he would teach
Flint a lesson. He'd show him he couldn't throw away a man as useful and
efficient as he'd been, like a sucked orange."

"Humph! A sucked orange. That's what he said, is it? A sucked orange,"
Hilary repeated.

"That's what he said," declared Mr. Jane, and remembered afterwards how
Hilary had been struck by the simile.

At ten o'clock at night, at the very height of the tumult, Senator
Whitredge had received an interrogatory telegram from Fairview, and had
called a private conference (in which Hilary was not included)