om, Dick and
Harry; and that is just what the smash is to-night. Dolly wants to
please everybody, thinking to get me votes for Congress, and so she has
invited all creation and his wife. There's old Peterkin, the roughest
kind of a canal bummer when Arthur went away. Think of my fastidious
brother shaking hands with him and Widow Shipley, who kept a low tavern
on the tow-path! She'll be there; in her silks and long gold chain, for
she has four boys, all voters, who call me _Frank_ and slap me on the
shoulder. Ugh! even I hate it all; and in a most perturbed state of
mind, the Hon. Frank and would-be Congressman continued to walk the room
lamenting the party which must be, and wondering what his aristocratic
brother would say to such a crowd in his house on the night of his
return.

And if there should be a Mrs. Arthur Tracy, with possibly some little
Tracys! But that idea was too horrible to contemplate, and so he tried
to put it from his mind, and to be as calm and quiet as possible until
lunch-time, when, with no very great amount of alacrity and
cheerfulness, he started for home, where, as he had been warned by his
wife when he left her in the morning, 'he was to lunch standing up or
anyhow, as she had no time for parade that day.'

CHAPTER II.

ARTHUR TRACY.

Although it was a morning in October, the grass in the park was as green
as in early June, while the flowers in the beds and borders, the
geraniums, the phlox, the stocks, and verbenas were handsomer, if
possible, than they had been in the summer-time: for the rain, which had
fallen almost continually during the month of September, had kept them
fresh and bright. Here and there the scarlet and golden tints of autumn
were beginning to show on the trees; but this only added a new charm to
a place which was noted for its beauty, and was the pride and admiration
of the town.

And yet Mrs. Frank Tracy, who stood on the wide piazza, looking after a
carriage which was moving down the avenue which led through the park to
the highway, did not seem as happy as the mistress of that house ought
to have been, standing there in the clear, crisp morning, with a silken
wrapper trailing behind her, a coquettish French cap on her head, and
costly jewels on her short, fat hands, which once were not as white and
soft as they were now. For Mrs. Frank Tracy, as Dorothy Smith, had known
what hard labor and poverty meant, and slights, too, because of the
poverty and lab