And yet Laura could not be quite content without prying into tomorrow.  How could the Colonel manage to free himself from his wife?  Would it be long?  Could he not go into some State where it would not take much time?  He could not say exactly.  That they must think of.  That they must talk over.  And so on.  Did this seem like a damnable plot to Laura against the life, maybe, of a sister, a woman like herself?  Probably not.  It was right that this man should be hers, and there were some obstacles in the way.  That was all.  There are as good reasons for bad actions as for good ones,—­to those who commit them.  When one has broken the tenth commandment, the others are not of much account.

Was it unnatural, therefore, that when George Selby departed, Laura should watch him from the window, with an almost joyful heart as he went down the sunny square?  “I shall see him to-morrow,” she said, “and the next day, and the next.  He is mine now.”

“Damn the woman,” said the Colonel as he picked his way down the steps.  “Or,” he added, as his thoughts took a new turn, “I wish my wife was in New Orleans.”

CHAPTER XL.

          Open your ears; for which of you will stop,
          The vent of hearing when loud Rumor speaks? 
          I, from the orient to the drooping west,
          Making the wind my post-horse, still unfold
          The acts commenced on this ball of earth: 
          Upon my tongues continual slanders ride;
          The which in every, language I pronounce,
          Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.

King Henry IV.

As may be readily believed, Col.  Beriah Sellers was by this time one of the best known men in Washington.  For the first time in his life his talents had a fair field.

He was now at the centre of the manufacture of gigantic schemes, of speculations of all sorts, of political and social gossip.  The atmosphere was full of little and big rumors and of vast, undefined expectations.  Everybody was in haste, too, to push on his private plan, and feverish in his haste, as if in constant apprehension that tomorrow would be Judgment Day.  Work while Congress is in session, said the uneasy spirit, for in the recess there is no work and no device.

The Colonel enjoyed this bustle and confusion amazingly; he thrived in the air of-indefinite expectation.  All his own schemes took larger shape and more misty and majestic proportions; and in this congenial air, the Colonel seemed even to himself to expand into something large and mysterious.  If he respected himself before, he almost worshipped Beriah Sellers now, as a superior being.  If he could have chosen an official position out of the highest, he would have been embarrassed in the selection.  The presidency of the republic seemed too limited and cramped in the constitutional restrictions.  If he could have been Grand Llama of the United States, that might have come the nearest to his idea of a position.  And next to that he would have luxuriated in the irresponsible omniscience of the Special Correspondent.