“H’m:  so you’re going into politics?”

“You’ve said it,” said Kent, subsiding among the pillows.  “Now will you go?”

* * * * *

It took the general manager a wakeful twenty-four hours to untangle the industrial snarl which was the receiver’s legacy to his successor; and David Kent slept through the major part of that interval, rising only in time to dress for dinner on the day following the retrieval of the Trans-Western.

In the grill-room of the Camelot he came face to face with Ormsby, and learned, something to his astonishment, that the Breezeland party had returned to the capital on the first train in from the west.

“I thought you were going to stay a month or more,” he said, with his eyes cast down.

“So did I,” said Ormsby.  “But Mrs. Brentwood cut it short.  She’s a town person, and so is Penelope.”  And it was not until the soup plates had been removed that he added a question.  “Are you going out to see them this evening, David?  You have my royal permission.”

“No”—­bluntly.

“Isn’t it up to you to go and give them a chance to jolly you a little?  I think they are all aching to do it.  Mrs. Hepzibah has seen the rising stock quotations, and she thinks you are It.”

“No; I can’t go there any more,” said Kent, and his voice was gruffer than he meant it to be.

“Why not?”

“There were good reasons before:  there are better ones now.”

“A seven-hundred-thousand-dollar difference?” suggested Ormsby, who had had speech with Loring.

Kent flushed a dull red.

“I sha’n’t strike you, Ormsby, no matter what you say,” he said doggedly.

“Humph!  There is one difference between you and Rabbi Balaam’s burro, David:  it could talk sense, and you can’t,” was the offensive rejoinder.

Kent changed the subject abruptly.

“Say, Ormsby; I’m going into a political office-hunt.  There is a death vacancy in the House, and I mean to have the nomination and election.  I don’t need money now, but I do need a friend.  Are you with me?”

“Oh, sure.  Miss Van Brock will answer for that.”

“But I don’t want you to do it on her account; I want you to do it for me.”

“It’s all one,” said the club-man.

Kent looked up quickly.

“You are right; that is the truest word you’ve said to-night,” and he went away, leaving the dessert untouched.

The evening was still young when Kent reached the house in Alameda Square.  Within the week the weather had changed, and the first chill of the approaching autumn was in the air.  The great square house was lighted and warmed, and the homelikeness of the place appealed to him as it never had before.  To her other gifts, which were many and diverse, Miss Van Brock added that of home-making; and the aftermath of battle is apt to be an acute longing for peace and quiet, for domesticity and creature comforts.