tell--he certainly should not. In the
evening it was bruited that Graves was sick, and the morrow's _Whig_
diagnosed his malady as influenza. Shelby thanked his practical stars
that the ducking had had no such issue for him. By the second evening
he was doubly thankful, for the press despatches were ticking out to
whom it might concern that the distinguished author of the ode on the
"Victory of Samothrace" and other poems lay low with pneumonia.

In common with hundreds, Shelby sent a message of regret, which, like
its fellow-hundreds, nobody at the Graves cottage found time to read.
Many of these notes and telegrams, however, found their way into the
_Whig_, but Shelby hunted its despised columns in vain for his own.
This seemed to him and to Bowers a deliberate attempt by Sprague to
stamp him as unfeeling,--to coin party capital,--and with the notion of
righting himself in the public eye Shelby determined upon a personal
call at the house. By a piece of good fortune, as unexpected as it was
welcome, he was received by Ruth, who had volunteered to lighten the
burden of the sick man's mother in ways like this. She was
unembarrassed, courteous, even kind in a formal fashion, telling him in
subdued accents what he knew she must know he knew already from the
newspapers. The patient's case discussed from every point of view, the
caller burned to forward his own concerns, to renew his apologies, to
make his peace; but he could find no opening, and shortly went away.
Yet his silence did him better service than speech. Ruth mistook his
unrest for contrition, and pitied him.

As Graves's disease neared its crisis, with hurried summoning of
consulting physicians and rumors of a resort to oxygen, Shelby found it
impossible to avoid an occasional glance into an immediate future in
which Graves figured merely as a memory; but whatever his speculations,
he was decently chary of voicing them. Some of his party associates
were more outspoken, and the opinion was advanced over the Tuscarora
House bar that, the loss to literature aside, the young man's
taking-off could not but simplify the political situation. The Hon.
Seneca Bowers, being of the old school, quaintly declined both
speculation and discussion.

The day of the crisis Shelby saw Dr. Crandall step from his phaeton to
his little sham Greek temple of an office at the foot of his lawn, and
followed him. The bluff physician greeted him with a scowl.

"Well, sir?" h