f his
last year--the railway cases, I mean."

"That was all right, Mr. Hastings," said Kelly with a wave of the hand.
"I had to have 'em in the interests of the party. I knowed the upper
court'd reverse. No, Lansing's a good party man--a good, sound man in
every way."

"I'm glad to hear it," said Hastings.

Before going into his private room to think and plan and telephone, he
looked out on the west veranda. There sat his daughter; and a few feet
away was David Hull, his long form stretched in a hammock while he
discoursed of his projects for a career as a political reformer. The
sight immensely pleased the old man. When he was a boy David Hull's
grandfather, Brainerd Hull, had been the great man of that region; and
Martin Hastings, a farm hand and the son of a farm hand, had looked up
at him as the embodiment of all that was grand and aristocratic. As
Hastings had never travelled, his notions of rank and position all
centred about Remsen City. Had he realized the extent of the world, he
would have regarded his ambition for a match between the daughter and
granddaughter of a farm hand and the son and grandson of a Remsen City
aristocrat as small and ridiculous. But he did not realize.

Davy saw him and sprang to his feet.

"No--no--don't disturb yourselves," cried the old man. "I've got some
things to 'tend to. You and Jenny go right ahead."

And he was off to his own little room where he conducted his own
business in his own primitive but highly efficacious way. A corps of
expert accountants could not have disentangled those crabbed,
criss-crossed figures; no solver of puzzles could have unravelled the
mystery of those strange hieroglyphics. But to the old man there
wasn't a difficult--or a dull--mark in that entire set of dirty,
dog-eared little account books. He spent hours in poring over them.
Just to turn the pages gave him keen pleasure; to read, and to
reconstruct from those hints the whole story of some agitating and
profitable operation, made in comparison the delight of an imaginative
boy in Monte Cristo or Crusoe seem a cold and tame emotion.

David talked on and on, fancying that Jane was listening and admiring,
when in fact she was busy with her own entirely different train of
thought. She kept the young man going because she did not wish to be
bored with her own solitude, because a man about always made life at
least a little more interesting than if she were alone or with a woman,
an