gloomed over the Ladgetts when they settled, temporarily, of course, into their old apartments two bedrooms, with a tin bathtub in a closet between them in the Astor House. They had not accumulated a stick of furniture during their twenty years in Congress, and the New Raynham home that they had built in the seventies, long before had been taken for its mortgage and the

taxes.

However, because credits in the stores of the town were easy for the nobility, and the Judge kept the flag of his hopes floating, for a year he managed to put up the outward show of prosperity. Always the white vest, the tail coat, the high hat, the red carnation, insignia of his nobility; always the grand manner - even in buying his cigars on credit; always the air that the author of the Ladgett Bill was stooping to dwell on a mortal plane; always the atmosphere of the grandeur that was Rome pervaded him. He made no new friends; when he came out of his lofty dream to speak at a formal occasion, the audience was made to feel that the author of the Ladgett Bill was still in public life.

Hiram Larson always had been his campaign

manager; always had spoken for the Judge, translating the oracles into the language of the people. Hiram continued at his post; and the Judge's casual appearances on Constitution Street during his first year of exile seemed to partake something of the nature of a pageant, so far removed was he from his fellows.

"He wears," said Colonel Longford one afternoon to Toney Delaney, as they sat in the back room of Boyce Kilworth's bank watching the Judge out skirmishing for a cigar-"He wears the hue

like that when some great painter dips

His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse."

"'Tis the procession of the bleedin' heart," returned Delaney. "And I wonder," he mused on, "whether the Judge really knows it's all over for him! He can't come back. Why, all the chief's money here wouldn't galvanize him! And, what's more, the chief's tied up the new man so tight he can't breathe."

The miserly drib of a pension which the Judge received for his service in an Indian war in the late sixties Mrs. Ladgett appropriated to bedeck

herself in a manner befitting her station as wife of the author of the Ladgett Bill. She referred to this pension as "our income," and precious little did Joel get to apply on Hiram Larson's rising account. It was her habit to commandeer periodically one of the three musty hacks in the town and call in regal pomp on such official families as she considered required calls from her.

On these occasions she would tell, with bated whispers, of the responsibilities at Washington that almost broke her husband's body and soul. She was careful to exhibit an indifferent view of the senators, a nicely restrained contempt for the Cabinet Members, and to withhold her loathing of the President's general incompetency only by main strength and awkwardness. But for Joel Ladgett

Mrs. Ladgett calmly left New Raynham to freeze with horror at the thought of what would have happened to a bleeding country if it had not been for the Judge.

When some of her friends suggested that she should join the Woman's Research Club, Mrs. Ladgett rested her arms proudly over her ample fortifications and smiled benignly and replied:

"I shall avail myself of the opportunity to visit

your

club

sometimes. But "here

she

paused" naturally for so short a time I can scarcely be expected to take an active part; I should hardly get into next year's work before the Judge would no longer feel the need of the rest he is taking and would be back in the harness again - and we shall be in Washington."

It was in those decadent days of the republic that Mrs. Ladgett began livening up the interest in her Thursday afternoons by telling the ladies mostly oldish ladies of an unfashionable cultof the temptations that beset public men in Washington. Such a seamy side did she turn to the ladies; such dreadful court secrets did she disclose; such an insight did she give her salon into the wicked life of the capital-that Elsie Barnes, the society editor of the Globe, once said:

Charley" speaking on the office square and under the Masonic pledge of secrecy which that solemn obligation put on the youth before her

Charley, if I could just get the right to publish what she reels off there at her Thursday afternoons, under some such a title as The Secret Memoirs of a Lady Dragoness in the Court of Theodore I, I could make our fortunes."

It was not Mrs. Ladgett's habit to paint a halo of virtue round the thin hair on the Judge's pink head; but she gave the strong impression that she had snatched him from the burning pit and held him spotless only by her own splendid qualities of heart and mind. She was not, however, the woman to say so!

Thus, as the Ladgetts' first year away from Washington went by, the town said that the dragoness was getting used to her chains. But people did not know how fiercely she snapped at those chains. It was in January following their return from Washington that Mrs. Ladgett breathed fire into the Judge's soul and sent him out, with the weapon of his trembling hopes, to release her from her captivity and take her to the heights where she was wont to dwell.

It was one thing to buckle on the Judge's armour and send him valiantly into Constitution Street; but, alas, it was quite another thing for the Judge to storm and retake the Kilworth fortress. As the Judge went into the marble and tiled splendour of the outer offices he clicked his heels as gayly as he could — for one whose legs seemed water beneath him and swung as jauntily as pos