To some the great event of that day in Brampton was to be the speech of the Honorable Heth Sutton in the meeting-house at eleven; others (and this party was quite as numerous) had looked forward to the base-ball game between Brampton and Harwich in the afternoon.  The painter would have preferred to walk up meeting-house hill with Cynthia, and from the cool heights look down upon the amphitheatre in which the town was built.  But Cynthia was interested in history, and they went to the meeting-house accordingly, where she listened for an hour and a half to the patriotic eloquence of the representative.  The painter was glad to see and hear so great a man in the hour of his glory, though so much as a fragment of the oration does not now remain in his memory.  In size, in figure, in expression, in the sonorous tones of his voice, Mr. Sutton was everything that a congressman should be.  “The people,” said Isaac D. Worthington in presenting him, “should indeed be proud of such an able and high-minded representative.”  We shall have cause to recall that word high-minded.

Many persons greeted Cynthia outside the meetinghouse, for the girl seemed genuinely loved by all who knew her—­too much loved, her companion thought, by certain spick-and-span young men of Brampton.  But they ate the lunch Cynthia had brought, far from the crowd, under the trees by Coniston Water.  It was she who proposed going to the base-ball game, and the painter stifled a sigh and acquiesced.  Their way brought them down Brampton Street, past a house with great iron dogs on the lawn, so imposing and cityfied that he hung back and asked who lived there.

“Mr. Worthington,” answered Cynthia, making to move on impatiently.

Her escort did not think much of the house, but it interested him as the type which Mr. Worthington had built.  On that same Gothic porch, sublimely unconscious of the covert stares and subdued comments of the passers-by, the first citizen himself and the Honorable Heth Sutton might be seen.  Mr. Worthington, whose hawklike look had become more pronounced, sat upright, while the Honorable Heth, his legs crossed, filled every nook and cranny of an arm-chair, and an occasional fragrant whiff from his cigar floated out to those on the tar sidewalk.  Although the pedestrians were but twenty feet away, what Mr. Worthington said never reached them; but the Honorable Heth on public days carried his voice of the Forum around with him.

“Come on,” said Cynthia, in one of those startling little tempers she was subject to; “don’t stand there like an idiot.”

Then the voice of Mr. Sutton boomed toward them.

“As I understand, Worthington,” they heard him say, “you want me to appoint young Wheelock for the Brampton post-office.”  He stuck his thumb into his vest pocket and recrossed his legs “I guess it can be arranged.”

When the painter at last overtook Cynthia the jewel paints he had so often longed to catch upon a canvas were in her eyes.  He fell back, wondering how he could so greatly have offended, when she put her hand on his sleeve.