th waiting for it. A respectable
stage-coach proprietor from Oregon got the place.

As for Jacobi, who was not disappointed, and who had nothing to ask
for, he was bitterest of all. He formally offered his congratulations to
Ratcliffe on his appointment. This little scene occurred in Mrs.
Lee's parlour. The old Baron, with his most suave manner, and his most
Voltairean leer, said that in all his experience, and he had seen a
great many court intrigues, he had never seen anything better managed
than that about the Treasury.

Ratcliffe was furiously angry, and told the Baron outright that foreign
ministers who insulted the governments to which they were accredited ran
a risk of being sent home.

"Ce serait toujours un pis aller," said Jacobi, seating himself with
calmness in Ratcliffe's favourite chair by Mrs. Lee's side.

Madeleine, alarmed as she was, could not help interposing, and hastily
asked whether that remark was translatable.

"Ah!" said the Baron; "I can do nothing with your language. You would
only say that it was a choice of evils, to go, or to stay."

"We might translate it by saying: 'One may go farther and fare worse,'"
rejoined Madeleine; and so the storm blew over for the time, and
Ratcliffe sulkily let the subject drop. Nevertheless the two men never
met in Mrs.

Lee's parlour without her dreading a personal altercation. Little by
little, what with Jacobi's sarcasms and Ratcliffe's roughness, they
nearly ceased to speak, and glared at each other like quarrelsome dogs.
Madeleine was driven to all kinds of expedients to keep the peace, yet
at the same time she could not but be greatly amused by their behaviour,
and as their hatred of each other only stimulated their devotion to her,
she was content to hold an even balance between them.

Nor were these all the awkward consequences of Ratcliffe's attentions.
Now that he was distinctly recognized as an intimate friend of Mrs.
Lee's, and possibly her future husband, no one ventured any longer to
attack him in her presence, but nevertheless she was conscious in a
thousand ways that the atmosphere became more and more dense under
the shadow of the Secretary of the Treasury. In spite of herself she
sometimes felt uneasy, as though there were conspiracy in the air. One
March afternoon she was sitting by her fire, with an English Review in
her hand, trying to read the last Symposium on the sympathies of Eternal
Punishment, when her servant brought in a ca