know his affairs as well as he knew them himself; and
who was still in Washington. He thought he could bring the information
in a day or two. As he then rose to go, Mr. Ratcliffe added that entire
secrecy was necessary, as the interests involved in obstructing the
search were considerable, and it was not well to wake them up. Mr. Keen
assented and went his way.

All this was natural enough and entirely proper, at least so far as
appeared on the surface. Had Mr. Keen been so curious in other people's
affairs as to look for the particular legislative measure which lay at
the bottom of Mr.

Ratcliffe's inquiries, he might have searched among the papers of
Congress a very long time and found himself greatly puzzled at last. In
fact there was no measure of the kind. The whole story was a fiction.
Mr. Ratcliffe had scarcely thought of Baker since his death, until the
day before, when he had seen his widow on the Mount Vernon steamer and
had found her in relations with Carrington. Something in Carrington's
habitual attitude and manner towards himself had long struck him as
peculiar, and this connection with Mrs. Baker had suggested to the
Senator the idea that it might be well to have an eye on both. Mrs.
Baker was a silly woman, as he knew, and there were old transactions
between Ratcliffe and Baker of which she might be informed, but which
Ratcliffe had no wish to see brought within Mrs. Lee's ken. As for
the fiction invented to set Keen in motion, it was an innocent one.
It harmed nobody. Ratcliffe selected this particular method of inquiry
because it was the easiest, safest, and most effectual. If he were
always to wait until he could afford to tell the precise truth, business
would very soon be at a standstill, and his career at an end.

This little matter disposed of; the Senator from Illinois passed his
afternoon in calling upon some of his brother senators, and the first
of those whom he honoured with a visit was Mr. Krebs, of Pennsylvania.
There were many reasons which now made the co-operation of that
high-minded statesman essential to Mr. Ratcliffe. The strongest of them
was that the Pennsylvania delegation in Congress was well disciplined
and could be used with peculiar advantage for purposes of "pressure."
Ratcliffe's success in his contest with the new President depended
on the amount of "pressure" he could employ. To keep himself in the
background, and to fling over the head of the raw Chief Magistrate a web