Annie stopped him, with her hand upon his arm.
“I don’t want you to finish that to-night. Please don’t, Seth. It would not be fair to me—or to yourself. Perhaps some other time when you have thought it over calmly—we will talk about it—that is, if you are of the same mind. If you are not, why, everything shall be just as it was before. And more than that, Seth, you—you mustn’t feel in the least bound by what has been said to-night. You know that I am older than you—two whole months! That isn’t as much as four years”—the meekest of her sex could scarcely have foregone that shaft—“but it gives me some sort of authority over you. And I am going to use it for your good. If it becomes necessary, I shall treat you like a perverse little boy, who doesn’t in the least know what is good for him.”
There was no discouragement to Seth in the tones of her speech, however non-committal its text might be. He put his arm about her and murmured:
“To think that I never knew until now! Ah, you make me very happy, Annie. And shall you be happy, too, do you think, happier than if we hadn’t met?”
She smiled as she disengaged herself, and gave him both hands to say that they must separate: “Happier at least than on the night of the fishing party. I cried myself to sleep that night.”
Seth found the house wholly dark, upon his return. He had no difficulty in getting to sleep, and his heavy slumber lasted until long after the breakfast hour the following forenoon.
CHAPTER XXIII.—THE CONVENTION: THE BOSS.
Tyre had seen better days. In the noble old time of stage coaches it had been a thriving, almost bustling place, with mills turning out wares celebrated through all the section, with a starch factory which literally gave the name of the town to its product as a standard of excellence, and with taverns which were rarely left with a vacant room more than a day at a time. In those days it had been a power in politics too. The old court-house which frowned now upon the village green, elbowing the more modern brick jail out of public sight, was supposed to have echoed in its time about the tallest eloquence that any court-house in the State had heard. From Tyre had come to Albany, and Washington as well, a whole cluster of strong, shrewd, stalwart-tongued politicians, who forced their way to speakerships, and judgeships, and even senatorships, like veritable sons of Anak. It was a Tyre man who had beaten Aaron Burr in such and such a memorable contest. It was another Tyre man who, by assuming lead of the distracted Bucktails at a certain crucial period, had defeated sundry machinations of the Clintonians, and sounded the death-knell of their hopes. There was a Tyre man in the Regency, of course, and he is popularly believed, at least in Jay County, to have held that storied syndicate up by the tail, so to speak, years after it would otherwise have collapsed. At every State Convention, in this fine old time, inferior politicians from other sections dissembled their appetites until Tyre had been fed to satiety. And in the sowing season of politics, when far-seeing candidates began arranging for a share in the autumn harvest of offices, no aspirant felt that his seed had a chance of sprouting until he had paid a pilgrimage to Tyre, and invoked the mercy, if he could not have the smiles, of the magnates there.