entioned to me once, but nothing was decided--absolutely nothing. I
didn't even promise to take it under advisement."

Among those who knew him only externally, Mr. Richard Gantry had the
reputation of owning a loose tongue. But none recognized more justly
than the real Richard Gantry the precise instant at which to bridle the
loose tongue or when to make it wag away from the subject which has
reached its nicely calculated climax. While the flush of irritation was
still making him ashamed that he had shown so much warmth, Blount found
himself gossiping with his table companion over a social function two
days old; and subsequently, when the waiter brought the cigars, Gantry
was congratulating himself that the danger-point, if any there were, was
safely past.

It was after the club luncheon, and while the two young men were on
their way to the smoking-room, that some one on business bent stopped
Gantry in the corridor. Blount strolled on by himself, and, finding the
smoking-room unoccupied, went to lounge in a lazy-chair standing in a
little alcove lined with bookcases and half screened by the racks of the
newspaper files. Notwithstanding the successful topic changing at table,
he was still brooding over the false position in which his father's
plans had placed him; wherefore he craved solitude and a chance to think
things over fairly and without heat.

Shortly afterward Gantry looked in, and, apparently missing the
half-concealed easy-chair and its occupant in the bookcase alcove, went
his way. He had scarcely had time to get out of the building, one would
say, before two men entered the smoking-room, coming down the corridor
from the grill. Blount saw them, and he made sure that they saw him. But
when they had taken chairs on the other side of the sheltering newspaper
files he was suddenly assured that they had not seen him. They were
talking quite freely of him and of his father.

"Well, the Honorable Dave has got McVickar dead to rights this time,"
remarked the older of the two, a hard-featured, round-bodied real-estate
promoter to whom Blount had been introduced on his first day in the
capital, but whose name he could not now recall. "This scheme of the
senator's for shoving his son into the race for the attorney-generalship
is just about the foxiest thing he has ever put across. You can bet the
air was blue in the Transcontinental Chicago offices when the news got
there."

"What do you suppose McVickar will do?