ld conference in Number Seven, and at
six o'clock sent a request that the Honourable Adam visit him. The
Honourable Adam would not come; and the fact leaked out--through the
Honourable Adam.

"He's mad clean through," reported the Honourable Elisha Jane, to whose
tact and diplomacy the mission had been confided. "He said he would
teach Flint a lesson. He'd show him he couldn't throw away a man as
useful and efficient as he'd been, like a sucked orange."

"Humph! A sucked orange. That's what he said, is it? A sucked orange,"
Hilary repeated.

"That's what he said," declared Mr. Jane, and remembered afterwards how
Hilary had been struck by the simile.

At ten o'clock at night, at the very height of the tumult, Senator
Whitredge had received an interrogatory telegram from Fairview, and had
called a private conference (in which Hilary was not included) in a back
room on the second floor (where the conflicting bands of Mr. Crewe and
Mr. Hunt could not be heard), which Mr. Manning and Mr. Jane and State
Senator Billings and Mr. Ridout attended. Query: the Honourable Hilary
had quarrelled with Mr. Flint, that was an open secret; did not Mr.
Vane think himself justified, from his own point of view, in taking a
singular revenge in not over-exerting himself to pull the Honourable
Adam out, thereby leaving the field open for his son, Austen Vane, with
whom he was apparently reconciled? Not that Mr. Flint had hinted of such
a thing! He had, in the telegram, merely urged the senator himself to
see Mr. Hunt, and to make one more attempt to restrain the loyalty to
that candidate of Messrs. Bascom and Botcher.

The senator made the attempt, and failed signally.

It was half-past midnight by the shining face of the clock on the tower
of the state-house, and hope flamed high in the bosom of the Honourable
Adam B. Hunt a tribute to the bellows-like skill of Messrs. Bascom and
Botcher. The bands in the street had blown themselves out, the delegates
were at last seeking rest, the hall boys in the corridors were turning
down the lights, and the Honourable Adam, in a complacent and even
jubilant frame of mind, had put on his carpet slippers and taken off his
coat, when there came a knock at his door. He was not a little amazed
and embarrassed, upon opening it, to see the Honourable Hilary. But
these feelings gave place almost immediately to a sense of triumph; gone
were the days when he had to report to Number Seven. Number Seven, in
t