rnament.

At ten o'clock the games began--and I took the Blight and the little
sister down to the "grandstand"--several tiers of backless benches with
leaves for a canopy and the river singing through rhododendrons behind.
There was jumping broad and high, and a 100-yard dash and hurdling and
throwing the hammer, which the Blight said were not interesting--they
were too much like college sports--and she wanted to see the base-ball
game and the tournament. And yet Marston was in them all--dogged and
resistless--his teeth set and his eyes anywhere but lifted toward the
Blight, who secretly proud, as I believed, but openly defiant, mentioned
not his name even when he lost, which was twice only.

"Pretty good, isn't he?" I said.

"Who?" she said indifferently.

"Oh, nobody," I said, turning to smile, but not turning quickly enough.

"What's the matter with you?" asked the Blight sharply.

"Nothing, nothing at all," I said, and straightway the Blight thought
she wanted to go home. The thunder of the Declaration was still rumbling
in the poplar grove.

"That's the Hon. Sam Budd," I said.

"Don't you want to hear him?"

"I don't care who it is and I don't want to hear him and I think you are
hateful."

Ah, dear me, it was more serious than I thought. There were
tears in her eyes, and I led the Blight and the little sister
home--conscience-stricken and humbled. Still I would find that young
jackanapes of an engineer and let him know that anybody who made the
Blight unhappy must deal with me. I would take him by the neck and pound
some sense into him. I found him lofty, uncommunicative, perfectly alien
to any consciousness that I could have any knowledge of what was going
or any right to poke my nose into anybody's business--and I did nothing
except go back to lunch--to find the Blight upstairs and the little
sister indignant with me.

"You just let them alone," she said severely.

"Let who alone?" I said, lapsing into the speech of childhood.

"You--just--let--them--alone," she repeated.

"I've already made up my mind to that."

"Well, then!" she said, with an air of satisfaction, but why I don't
know.

I went back to the poplar grove. The Declaration was over and the crowd
was gone, but there was the Hon. Samuel Budd, mopping his brow with
one hand, slapping his thigh with the other, and all but executing a
pigeon-wing on the turf. He turned goggles on me that literally shone
triumph.

"He's come--Dave B