l, you
know."

"Yes, I know," Graves answered.

Shelby turned again to the circle of women, and Graves left the
building. A few minutes later he entered the _Whig_ office and made
his way to Sprague's cluttered sanctum.

"Volney," he announced, as the editor peered genially from underneath
the green drop-light, "I want to browse in your file of the
Congressional Record. And you've Garfield's Works down here, too,
haven't you?"

CHAPTER VI

Shelby stretched himself awake and contentedly surveyed his bachelor
bedroom in the Tuscarora House. He had boarded at this establishment
upward of five years, and his chamber had been decorated and, to a
degree, furnished in accord with his notions of elegant comfort. The
wall paper was a pattern which William Morris and his disciples would
have writhed to behold,--a hideous terra-cotta ground overrun with
meaningless scrolls and stiff garlands of roses of an unearthly pink.
There were stuffy maroon lambrequins above the window casements, and
two large blue vases, containing many-dyed plumes of pampas grass,
flanked like rigid sentinels a pseudo-marble clock upon the truly
marble mantelpiece which somehow suggested a mausoleum falling to
decay; while the blue motive was further emphasized by a plush
photograph album, with a little mirror let into its cover, standing in
a metallic holder on the bureau, whose sombre walnut matched the bed
and chairs. The pictures included a chromo, depicting an impossible
castle set in an equally impossible landscape, a print or two of race
horses, a lithograph of a poker game in supposably high life, and a
photogravure of a painting familiar to the habitues of a great
metropolitan hotel, popularly fancied in the country to be daring in
the extreme. At first sight of the original, over the rim of a
cocktail, Shelby had been fired with the resolve to own some sort of
copy, and even now, after several years of possession, he esteemed it
one of the world's masterpieces of pictorial art.

He dressed himself in the same content which had flushed his waking
revery. The plaudits of last night's mass-meeting still rang
harmoniously in his ears, and the praise of Ruth Temple and Mrs.
Hilliard was sweeter in retrospect than it had been in reality. This
happy serenity bore him company through the bare echoing corridors of
the hotel to the office, to be heightened by the gratulations of the
landlord and the help, who seemed to feel that a vi