y with Dorothy by his side. For all that, it is Richard's due to
say that his "R. S." letters attracted polite as well as political
attention, and got him much respected and condemned. Also they lodged
him high in the esteem of Senator Hanway, who discovered daily new
excellencies in him; and this came somewhat to the rescue of Richard one
day.

Senator Hanway had a room in a wing of the Harley house which Mrs.
Hanway-Harley called his study. It was a sumptuous apartment, furnished
in mahogany and leather, and a bookcase, filled with Congressional
Records which nobody ever looked at, stood against the wall. Here it was
that Senator Hanway held his conferences; it was here he laid his plans
and brooded them. When Senator Hanway desired to meet a gentleman and
preferred to keep the meeting dark, this study was the scene of that
secrecy. In such event, the blinds were drawn to baffle what prying or
casual eye might come marching up the street; for in Washington, to see
two men conversing, is to know nine times in ten precisely what the
conversation is about. Commonly, however, the blinds were thrown wide,
as though the study's pure proprietor courted a world's scrutiny.

It was in this study that Richard was received by Senator Hanway. There
was an outside door; a caller might be admitted from the veranda without
troubling the main portals of the Harley house. To save the patience of
that journalist, Senator Hanway called Richard's attention to the
veranda door, and commissioned him to make use of it. Senator Hanway
said that he did not wish to subject one whom he valued so highly, and
who was on such near terms with his good friend, Mr. Gwynn, to the slow
ceremony which attended a regular invasion of the premises.

Richard thanked Senator Hanway, although he could have liked it better
had he been less thoughtfully polite. Richard would have preferred the
main floor, with whatever delay and formal clatter such entrance made
imperative. The more delay and the more clatter, the more chance of
seeing Dorothy. It struck him with a dubious chill when Senator Hanway
suddenly distinguished him with the freedom of that veranda door--a
franchise upon which your statesman laid flattering emphasis, saying
that not ten others had been granted it.

This episode of the veranda door befell upon the earliest visit which
Richard made in his quality of correspondent of the _Daily Tory_. On
that day, being admitted by way of the Harley fr