wly. Rhodes lifted one leg on to the other knee and
nursed it. It was his confidential attitude.

"It's a delicate matter, you see. Van Ness is concerned."

"Van Ness, the antiquarian?"

"Oh, he's more than that! You don't suppose a man of his breadth of
intellect confines himself to old bricks and dry bones? Why, God bless
you! Pliny Van Ness is the final authority in Philadelphia on new
singers or pictures or cracked teapots or great religious or
philanthropic reforms. If he were taken from it, the underpinnings of
that town would be knocked away, and it would fall flat."

"Last fall, I think, I heard he had a plan for enforcing compulsory
education in Pennsylvania?"

"Well, yes. I don't know why that didn't pass. It died out. Van Ness was
trying, too, to establish a grand scheme for the benefit of the mining
population. But somehow I haven't heard of that lately. Oh he's a great
man, sir! When I hear him talk half an hour it quite lifts me up to
purer air. I always say when I come away, 'Joe Rhodes, you're a selfish
scoundrel! A selfish scoundrel!'"

The judge smoked in silence a few minutes. "Yes," he resumed
thoughtfully, "it was about Van Ness. Poor Laidley had that reverence
for him which men of his calibre are apt to have for a character of
perfect excellence, and in his anxiety for Jane he planned that a
marriage should be brought about between them. I was to inaugurate the
matter--bring them together. Easily, naturally, you understand? The sort
of thing that is done every day. I've seen excellent matches made in
Virginia by a little quiet management of friends."

"Yes. It is done every day." Mr. Neckart yesterday would have talked of
the marriages of half the women he knew as "good matches" or "well
managed" without knowing that he was vulgar in so doing. But now the
whole idea struck him as loathsome and disgusting. Were women to be
paraded before their buyers as in a slave-market? He looked at the poor
judge babbling innocently as he might at some venal go-between in the
markets of Cairo.

"Thinking the matter over," pursued the judge anxiously, "it has
occurred to me that Laidley would not have been so confident of Van
Ness's ultimate concurrence in the scheme unless Pliny had shown some
prepossession in favor of the little girl."

"You think, then, the sultan is ready to throw the handkerchief?" dryly.

"Oh, that's a coarse way of putting it, Neckart. But, considered as a
match, now, really, yo