were looking at him; they strained their ears to miss no cadence of his voice.  Involuntarily he straightened himself, stretched forth his hand with the pale, thin fingers gracefully disposed, and passed it slowly before him from side to side, in a comprehensive, stately gesture.  The audience rose at him, as he dropped his hand, and filled his day-dream with a mighty roar of applause, in volume like an ocean tempest, yet pitched for his hearing alone.

He smiled, shook himself with a little delighted tremor, and turned on the stoop to the open door.

“What Soulsby said about politics out there interested me enormously,” he remarked to the two women.  “I shouldn’t be surprised if I found myself doing something in that line.  I can speak, you know, if I can’t do anything else.  Talk is what tells, these days.  Who knows?  I may turn up in Washington a full-blown senator before I’m forty.  Stranger things have happened than that, out West!”

“We’ll come down and visit you then, Soulsby and I,” said Sister Soulsby, cheerfully.  “You shall take us to the White House, Alice, and introduce us.”

“Oh, it isn’t likely I would come East,” said Alice, pensively.  “Most probably I’d be left to amuse myself in Seattle.  But there—­I think that’s the carriage driving up to the door.”