er in Barnesville than in Washington. I believe you would.
Take me to see the claimants to-morrow."

CHAPTER XXVII

When Judge Rutherford piloted him up the broad, unpaved avenue towards
the small house near Dupont Circle, the first objects which caught
Farquhar's gaze were two young people standing among the unkempt rose and
syringa bushes in the little front garden. The slim grace and bloom of
their youth would have caught any eye. They were laughing happily, and
the girl held a branch of rosy blossoms in her hand.

"Are they the claimants?" Farquhar enquired.

"One of them is," answered Rutherford. "But Sheba--Sheba counts somehow."

Sheba looked at the stranger with the soft gaze of deer-like eyes when he
was presented to her. There was no shyness in her woodland smile.

"Judge Rutherford," she said, "Uncle Matt has come--Rupert's Matt, you
know. We can't help laughing about it, but we can't help being happy."

The boyish Southern face at her side laughed and glowed. Matt represented
to Rupert the Lares and Penates his emotional nature required and had
been denied.

"If he were not such a practical creature," he said, "I might not know
what to do with him. But he worked his way here by engaging himself for
the journey as a sort of nurse to an invalid young man who wanted to join
his family in Washington and was too weak to travel alone."

The further from romance the world drifts, the fairer it becomes in its
fagged eyes. So few stories unfold themselves sweetly from beginning to
end that a first chapter is always more or less alluring, and as he
marked the youth and beauty of those two and saw how their young eyes and
smiles met in question and response at every thought, to Farquhar, who
still retained the fragments of an imagination not wholly blighted by the
House of Representatives, it seemed rather as if he had wandered into a
world where young Cupid and Psyche still moved and breathed in human
guise. As central figures of a government claim, the pair were
exquisitely incongruous. Their youth was so radiant and untried, their
bright good looks so bloomed, that the man looking at them felt--with a
realising sense of humour as well as fanciful sentiment--as if a spring
wind wafted through a wood close grown with wild daffodils had swept into
a heated manufactory where machinery whirred and ill-clad workers bent
over their toil.

"Uncle Tom will be very glad to see you," said Sheba, as they went