"But I won't leave you, father, I won't--I won't! It'll be just the same for us--tell me it will!"
"Oh, yes," he said, "that part of it'll be all right. But tell me--what's the rush?"
"Why, father, there isn't any rush--only, don't you know how every one's against him just now?"
"Humph!" he said, "not if the reports of his meetings is correct, they hain't."
"Well, I know; but they tell such stories about him, and this horrible roorback--isn't that what they call it?"
"Depends on who you mean by they," he answered.
"Well, you know," she said, in the assumption that avoided explanations, "I want to show them that I believe in him, anyway."
"That's like you, Em," he said, smiling at her. "It's like your mother, too."
She was touched by this. He seldom spoke of her mother. And she drew nearer to him, and ran her fingers fondly through his white hair.
"Have you been thinking of her?" she asked, with a tender reverence.
"Some--to-night," he said. "She stuck up for me once." And then he was silent again.
The girl, with the impatience of youth, tried to coax him away from his sad humor, and assumed a happy tone, though she blinked to keep back her tears.
"Oh, it won't be for a long time, really, father--not till fall, not till after election, anyway. And it shan't make any difference, shall it? No, we'll all be so happy together. You and Jerome can play cards in the evening--and it'll be ever so much livelier in this big, empty old house."
The old man conceived the picture she imagined for him, but one of his grotesque humors came upon him.
"D'ye think Mother Garwood'll like the board?" he asked.
"Father!" Emily protested, "you'd joke at a funeral!"
The seven members of the congressional committee, assembled in Judge Bromley's office, sat in a circle around the wall, beneath the pictures of Chief-justice Marshall, of Daniel Webster, and of Blackstone, reflecting in their faces, with a studied effort that pained them, the seriousness of those jurists. They sat in silence, looking now and then one at another, or most of all at McFarlane, the chairman, who by virtue of his office sat nearest the roll-top desk of the judge, and, out of a disposition to show the ease of his footing with the candidate, carelessly swung back and forth the revolving bookcase, which creaked under its load of the Illinois Reports and Kinney's Digest.