Loring chewed his cigar reflectively, wishing his companion would open the way to free speech on the subject presumably nearest his heart.  He had a word of comfort, negative comfort, to offer, but it might not be said until Kent should give him leave by taking the initiative.  Kent broke silence at last, but the prompting was nothing more pertinent than the chalking-up of the delayed train’s time.

“An hour and twenty minutes:  that means any time after nine o’clock.  I’m honestly sorry for you, Grantham—­sorry for any one that has to stay in this charnel-house of a town ten minutes after he’s through.  What will you do with yourself?”

Loring got up, looked at his watch, and made a suggestion, hoping that Kent would fall in with it.

“I don’t know.  Shall we go back to your rooms and sit a while?”

The exile’s eyes gloomed suddenly.

“Not unless you insist on it.  We should get back among the relics and I should bore you.  I’m not the man you used to know, Grantham.”

“No?” said Loring.  “I sha’n’t be hypocritical enough to contradict you.  Nevertheless, you are my host.  It is for you to say what you will do with me until train time.”

“We can kill an hour at the rally, if you like.  You have seen the street parade and heard the band play:  it is only fair that you should see the menagerie on exhibition.”

Loring found his match-box and made a fresh light for his cigar.

“It’s pretty evident that you and ‘next-Governor’ Bucks are on opposite sides of the political fence,” he observed.

“We are.  I should think a good bit less of myself than I do—­and that’s needless—­if I trained in his company.”

“Yet you will give him a chance to make a partizan of me?  Well, come along.  Politics are not down on my western programme, but I’m here to see all the new things.”

The Gaston Opera House was a survival of the flush times, and barring a certain tawdriness from disuse and neglect, and a rather garish effect which marched evenly with the brick-and-terra-cotta fronts in Texas Street and the American-Tudor cottages of the suburbs, it was a creditable relic.  The auditorium was well filled in pit, dress-circle and gallery when Kent and his guest edged their way through the standing committee in the foyer; but by dint of careful searching they succeeded in finding two seats well around to the left, with a balcony pillar to separate them from their nearest neighbors.

Since the public side of American politics varies little with the variation of latitude or longitude, the man from the East found himself at once in homely and remindful surroundings.  There was the customary draping of flags under the proscenium arch and across the set-piece villa of the background.  In the semicircle of chairs arched from wing to wing sat the local and visiting political lights; men of all trades, these, some of them a little shamefaced and ill at ease by reason of their unwonted conspicuity; all of them listening with a carefully assumed air of strained attention to the speaker of the moment.