hoping that
Kent would fall in with it.

"I don't know. Shall we go back to your rooms and sit a while?"

The exile's eyes gloomed suddenly.

"Not unless you insist on it. We should get back among the relics and I
should bore you. I'm not the man you used to know, Grantham."

"No?" said Loring. "I sha'n't be hypocritical enough to contradict you.
Nevertheless, you are my host. It is for you to say what you will do with
me until train time."

"We can kill an hour at the rally, if you like. You have seen the street
parade and heard the band play: it is only fair that you should see the
menagerie on exhibition."

Loring found his match-box and made a fresh light for his cigar.

"It's pretty evident that you and 'next-Governor' Bucks are on opposite
sides of the political fence," he observed.

"We are. I should think a good bit less of myself than I do--and that's
needless--if I trained in his company."

"Yet you will give him a chance to make a partizan of me? Well, come
along. Politics are not down on my western programme, but I'm here to see
all the new things."

The Gaston Opera House was a survival of the flush times, and barring a
certain tawdriness from disuse and neglect, and a rather garish effect
which marched evenly with the brick-and-terra-cotta fronts in Texas Street
and the American-Tudor cottages of the suburbs, it was a creditable relic.
The auditorium was well filled in pit, dress-circle and gallery when Kent
and his guest edged their way through the standing committee in the foyer;
but by dint of careful searching they succeeded in finding two seats well
around to the left, with a balcony pillar to separate them from their
nearest neighbors.

Since the public side of American politics varies little with the
variation of latitude or longitude, the man from the East found himself at
once in homely and remindful surroundings. There was the customary draping
of flags under the proscenium arch and across the set-piece villa of the
background. In the semicircle of chairs arched from wing to wing sat the
local and visiting political lights; men of all trades, these, some of
them a little shamefaced and ill at ease by reason of their unwonted
conspicuity; all of them listening with a carefully assumed air of
strained attention to the speaker of the moment.

Also, there was the characteristic ante-election audience, typical of all
America--the thing most truly typical in a land where national types a