ew
life, Fannie, wherever it is, I shall stay with him."

Fair gave the day mainly to the annual meeting of the trustees at Suez
University. The corner-stone was not to be laid until the morrow. March
reopened his office, but did almost no work, owing to the steady stream
of callers from all round the square coming to wish him well with
handshake and laugh, and with jests which more or less subtly implied
their conviction that he was somehow master of the hour. When Ravenel
came others slipped out, although he pleasantly remarked that they need
not, and those who looked in later and saw the two men sitting face to
face drew back. "That thing last night," said Weed to Usher, going to
the door of their store to throw his quid into the street, "givm the
_Courier_ about the hahdest kick in the ribs she evva got." But no one
divined Ravenel's errand, unless Garnet darkly suspected it as he waited
beside Jeff-Jack's desk for its owner's return, to ask him for ten
thousand dollars on a mortgage of his half of Widewood, with which to
quiet, he serenely explained, any momentary alarm among holders of his
obligations. And even Garnet did not guess that Ravenel would not have
telegraphed, as he did, to a bank in Pulaski City in which he was
director, to grant the loan, had not John March just declined his offer
of a third interest in the _Courier_.

At evening March and Fair dined together in Hotel Swanee. They took a
table at a window and talked but little, and then softly, with a placid
gravity, on trivial topics, keeping serious ones for a better privacy,
though all other guests had eaten and gone. Only Shotwell, unaware of
their presence, lingered over his pie and discussed Garnet's affair with
the head waitress, an American lady. He read to her on the all-absorbing
theme, from the Pulaski City _Clarion_; whose editor, while mingling
solemn reprobations with amazed regrets, admitted that a sin less dark
than David's had been confessed from the depths of David's repentance.
In return she would have read him the Suez _Courier's_ much fuller
history of the whole matter; but he had read it, and with a kindly smile
condemned it as "suspended in a circumaambient air of edito'ial
silence."

"I know not what co'se othe's may take, my dea' madam, but as faw me,
give me neither poverty naw riches; give me political indispensability;
the pa-apers have drawn the mantle of charity ove' 'im, till it covers
him like a circus-tent."

"Ah