“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!”
XIII
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.
The members of the committee were smoking cigars from a box the judge had provided, a box of five-cent domestic cigars, which fouled the atmosphere of the private office with their thick white smoke. The smoke from the Havana cigar the judge himself was smoking, wriggled upward in a blue wraith from the white hand that held it, and the judge only raised the cigar to his lips often enough to keep it alight, and as if to aid his mental processes. These processes were doubtless profound, for he bent his head, and wrinkled his brow, and looked intently at the silver-mounted furnishings of his desk. He had already sat there what seemed to the waiting politicians a long time, and had not moved. But at last he dropped the eraser with which he had been playing while he thought, and, lightly touching the revolving bookcase, for its swing and creak made him nervous, he gave a judicial cough.