From which it may be inferred that nothing occurred to disturb the security of Gashwiler.  When the door closed upon Mr. Wiles, he indited a note which, with a costly but exceedingly distasteful bouquet,—­rearranged by his own fat fingers, and discord and incongruity visible in every combination of color,—­he sent off by a special messenger.  Then he proceeded to make his toilet,—­an operation rarely graceful or picturesque in our sex, and an insult to the spectator when obesity is superadded.  When he had put on a clean shirt, of which there was grossly too much, and added a white waistcoat, that seemed to accent his rotundity, he completed his attire with a black frock coat of the latest style, and surveyed himself complacently before a mirror.  It is to be recorded that, however satisfactory the result might have been to Mr. Gashwiler, it was not so to the disinterested spectator.  There are some men on whom “that deformed thief, Fashion,” avenges himself by making their clothes appear perennially new.  The gloss of the tailor’s iron never disappears; the creases of the shelf perpetually rise in judgment against the wearer.  Novelty was the general suggestion of Mr. Gashwiler’s full-dress,—­it was never his habitude;—­and “Our own Make,” “Nobby,” and the “Latest Style, only $15,” was as patent on the legislator’s broad back as if it still retained the shop-man’s ticket.

Thus arrayed, within an hour he complacently followed the note and his floral offering.  The house he sought had been once the residence of a foreign Ambassador, who had loyally represented his government in a single unimportant treaty, now forgotten, and in various receptions and dinners, still actively remembered by occasional visits to its salon; now the average dreary American parlor.  “Dear me,” the fascinating Mr. X would say, “but do you know, love, in this very room I remember meeting the distinguished Marquis of Monte Pio;” or perhaps the fashionable Jones of the State Department instantly crushed the decayed friend he was perfunctorily visiting by saying, “’Pon my soul, you here;—­why, the last time I was in this room I gossiped for an hour with the Countess de Castenet in that very corner.”  For, with the recall of the aforesaid Ambassador, the mansion had become a boarding-place, kept by the wife of a departmental clerk.

Perhaps there was nothing in the history of the house more quaint and philosophic than the story of its present occupant.  Roger Fauquier had been a departmental clerk for forty years.  It was at once his practical good luck and his misfortune to have been early appointed to a position which required a thorough and complete knowledge of the formulas and routine of a department that expended millions of the public funds.  Fauquier, on a poor salary, diminishing instead of increasing with his service, had seen successive administrations bud and blossom and decay, but had kept his position through the fact that his knowledge was a necessity