him again! let us go
ourselves, now, in the morning train, before he comes back. I'm
all ready; I'll pack everything for you; we'll go to Newport; to
Europe--anywhere, to be out of his reach!"

With this passionate appeal, Sybil threw herself on her knees by her
sister's side, and, clasping her arms around Madeleine's waist, sobbed
as though her heart were already broken. Had Carrington seen her then
he must have admitted that she had carried out his instructions to the
letter. She was quite honest, too, in it all. She meant what she
said, and her tears were real tears that had been pent up for weeks.
Unluckily, her logic was feeble. Her idea of Mr. Ratcliffe's character
was vague, and biased by mere theories of what a Prairie Giant of
Peonia should be in his domestic relations. Her idea of Peonia, too,
was indistinct. She was haunted by a vision of her sister, sitting on
a horse-hair sofa before an air-tight iron stove in a small room with
high, bare white walls, a chromolithograph on each, and at her side a
marble-topped table surmounted by a glass vase containing funereal dried
grasses; the only literature, Frank Leslie's periodical and the New York
Ledger, with a strong smell of cooking everywhere prevalent. Here
she saw Madeleine receiving visitors, the wives of neighbours and
constituents, who told her the Peonia news.

Notwithstanding her ignorant and unreasonable prejudice against western
men and women, western towns and prairies, and, in short, everything
western, down to western politics and western politicians, whom she
perversely asserted to be tue lowest ot all western products, there
was still some common sense in Sybil's idea. When that inevitable hour
struck for Mr.

Ratcliffe, which strikes sooner or later for all politicians, and an
ungrateful country permitted him to pine among his friends in Illinois,
what did he propose to do with his wife? Did he seriously suppose that
she, who was bored to death by New York, and had been able to find no
permanent pleasure in Europe, would live quietly in the romantic village
of Peonia? If not, did Mr. Ratcliffe imagine that they could find
happiness in the enjoyment of each other's society, and of Mrs. Lee's
income, in the excitements of Washington? In the ardour of his pursuit,
Mr. Ratcliffe had accepted in advance any conditions which Mrs. Lee
might impose, but if he really imagined that happiness and content lay
on the purple rim of this sunset, he had more