he Livingstone crowd,
or of the British secret service. What can you expect?"

"How long will it last? What is doing against it?" said Arthur.

"Ask me easier questions. Anyway, I'm only consoling the Senator for the
hard knocks he's getting for the sake of old Ireland. Cheer up,
Senator."

"Even when Fritters made his bow," said the mournful Senator, "they made
game of me," and the tears rose to his eyes. Arthur felt a secret rage
at this grief.

"You heard of Fritters?" and Arthur nodded. "He arrived, and the
Columbia College crowd started him off with a grand banquet. He's an
Oxford historian with a new recipe for cooking history. The Columbia
professor who stood sponsor for him at the banquet told the world that
Fritters would show how English government worked among the Irish, and
how impossible is the Anglo-Saxon idea among peoples in whom barbarism
does not die with the appearance and advance of civilization. He touched
up the elegant parades and genial shindys of St. Patrick's Day as
'inexplicable dumb shows and noise,'--see Hamlet's address to the
players--and hoped the banks of our glorious Hudson would never witness
the bloody rows peculiar to the banks of the immortal Boyne. Then he
dragged in the Senator."

"What's his little game?" Arthur asked.

"Scientific ridicule ... the press plays to the galleries, and Fritters
to the boxes ... it's a part of the general scheme ... I tell you
there's going to be fun galore this winter ... and the man in London is
at the root of the deviltry."

"What's to be done?"

"If we only knew," the Senator groaned. "If we could only get them under
our fists, in a fair and square tussle!"

"I think the hinge of the Livingstone plan is Sister Claire, the escaped
nun," Grahame said thoughtfully. "She's the star of the combination,
appeals to the true blue church-member with descriptions of the horrors
of convents. Her book is out, and you'll find a copy waiting for you at
home. Dime novels are prayer-books beside it. French novels are virtuous
compared with it. It is raising an awful row. On the strength of it
McMeeter has begun an enterprise for the relief of imprisoned nuns--to
rescue them--house them for a time, and see them safely married. Sister
Claire is to be matron of the house of escaped nuns. No one doubts her
experience. Now isn't that McMeeter all over? But see the book, the
_Confessions of an Escaped Nun_."

"You think she's the hinge of the great scheme?