t, could never be again as it had been before, and he sighed
deeply as he recalled his talk with the old prime minister at Geneva.
Then he laughed quietly as he remembered Chauvenet and Durand and the
dark house on the Boulevard Froissart; but the further recollection of
the attack made on his life on the deck of the _King Edward_ sobered him,
and he turned away from the window impatiently. He had seen the sick
second-cabin passenger leave the steamer at New York, but had taken no
trouble either to watch or to avoid him. Very likely the man was under
instructions, and had been told to follow the Claibornes home; and the
thought of their identification with himself by his enemies angered him.
Chauvenet was likely to appear in Washington at any time, and would
undoubtedly seek the Claibornes at once. The fact that the man was a
scoundrel might, in some circumstances, have afforded Armitage comfort,
but here again Armitage's mood grew dark. Jules Chauvenet was undoubtedly
a rascal of a shrewd and dangerous type; but who, pray, was John
Armitage?

The bell in his entry rang, and he flashed on the lights and opened the
door.

"Well, I like this! Setting yourself up here in gloomy splendor and never
saying a word. You never deserved to have any friends, John Armitage!"

"Jim Sanderson, come in!" Armitage grasped the hands of a red-bearded
giant of forty, the possessor of alert brown eyes and a big voice.

"It's my rural habit of reading the register every night in search of
constituents that brings me here. They said they guessed you were in, so
I just came up to see whether you were opening a poker game or had come
to sneak a claim past the watch-dog of the treasury."

The caller threw himself into a chair and rolled a fat, unlighted cigar
about in his mouth. "You're a peach, all right, and as offensively hale
and handsome as ever. When are you going to the ranch?"

"Well, not just immediately; I want to sample the flesh-pots for a day or
two."

"You're getting soft,--that's what's the matter with you! You're afraid
of the spring zephyrs on the Montana range. Well, I'll admit that it's
rather more diverting here."

"There is no debating that, Senator. How do you like being a statesman?
It was so sudden and all that. I read an awful roast of you in an English
paper. They took your election to the Senate as another evidence of
the complete domination of our politics by the plutocrats."

Sanderson winked prodigiously.