had no right to do so, she had thus
regarded what he said to her in the dining-room that night, and of his
pathetic situation in regard to a father she never meant to say a word
to anybody.

"I sized him up for a remarkable man," said she, "when I saw the
wonderful way he sat upon his hat that afternoon. Don't you remember? He
struck me then as the most natural, unconscious, and direct human being
I ever saw--don't you think that?--and now think of his powers of
concentration. All his waking time, except what he gives to the _Post_,
goes to that awful book of his. He is ridiculous now because his theory
of life is ridiculous. But suppose it popped into his head some day to
switch all that directness and concentrated energy in some other
direction. Don't you think he might be rather a formidable young
person?"

West conceded that there might be something in that. And happening to
glance across the flower-sweet table at the moment, he was adroitly
detached and re-attached by the superbly "finished" Miss Avery.

The little dinner progressed. Nor was this the only spot in town where
evening meals were going forward amid stimulating talk. Far away over
the town, at the same hour, the paying guests of Mrs. Paynter's were
gathered about her hospitable board, plying the twin arts of supping and
talking. And as Sharlee's fellow-diners talked of Mr. Queed, it chanced
that Mr. Queed's fellow-suppers were talking of Sharlee, or at any rate
of her family's famous misfortune. Mr. Queed, it is true, did not
appreciate this fact, for the name of the female agent who had taken his
Twenty from him could not have been more unknown to him if she had been
a dweller in Phrygia or far Cappadocia.

Major Brooke told, not by request, one of his well-known stories about
how he had flouted and routed the Republicans in 1875. The plot of these
stories was always the same, but the setting shifted about here and
there, and this one had to do with a county election in which, the Major
said, the Republicans and negroes had gone the limit trying to swindle
the Democrats out of the esteemed offices.

"And I said, 'You'--the ladies will excuse me, I'm sure--'You lying
rascal,' s' I, 'don't you dare to contradict me! You're all tarred with
the same pitch,' s' I. 'Everything you touch turns corrupt and rotten.
Look at Henry G. Surface,' s' I. 'The finest fellow God ever made, till
the palsied hand of Republicanism fell upon him, and now cankering and