Patty was in a rage about something; nobody seemed to know what it was.

“You are not going to join the Auxiliary, are you, mother?” John inquired, putting the cues in the rack.

“Indeed I am not.  The men in my family always used their own judgment in politics.  They have always been Whigs or Republicans.”

“Did you ever meet a woman, Dick, who was a Democrat?” laughed John.

“Perhaps,” was the reply, “but it has escaped my recollection.”

But he was thinking:  after all, he had a right to win Patty if he could.  It was not what he had done in the past, it was what he was capable of doing from now on that counted.

“You’re going to have a stiff fight at the convention,” said John.

“I know it.  But a fight of any kind will keep my mind occupied.  The senator has assured me that I shall get the nomination.”

On the way home Mrs. Franklyn-Haldene saw the flutter of a white dress on the Wilmington-Fairchilds’ veranda.  She couldn’t resist, so she crossed the lawn and mounted the veranda steps.  She did not observe her husband in the corner, smoking with the master of the house.

“I’ve been over to the Benningtons’,” she began, rather breathless.

“What’s the news?”

“There is no truth in the report of Patty’s engagement to young Whiteland.”

“There isn’t?  Well, there ought to be, after the way they went around together last winter.”

“She told me so herself,” Mrs. Franklyn-Haldene declared emphatically.  “Do you know what I believe?”

“No,” truthfully.

“I’ve an idea that Patty is inclined toward that fellow Warrington.”

“You don’t mean it!”

“He’s always around there.  He must have thought a great deal of his aunt.  She was buried to-day, and there he is, playing billiards with John Bennington.  If that isn’t heartlessness!”

“What do you want a man to do?” growled her husband from behind his cigar.  “Sit in a dark room and wring his hands all day, like a woman?  Men have other things to do in life than mourn the departed.”

“Franklyn?  I didn’t see you.”

“You seldom do.”

Mrs. Franklyn-Haldene at once plunged into a discussion of fashion, the one thing that left her husband high and dry, so far as his native irony was concerned.

That same night McQuade concluded some interesting business.  He possessed large interests in the local breweries.  Breweries on the average do not pay very good dividends on stock, so the brewer often establishes a dozen saloons about town to help the business along.  McQuade owned a dozen or more of these saloons, some in the heart of the city, some in the outlying wards of the town.  He conducted the business with his usual shrewdness.  The saloons were all well managed by Germans, who, as a drinking people, are the most orderly in the world.  It was not generally known that McQuade was interested in the sale of liquors.  His name was never mentioned in connection with the saloons.