Low he lies, yet high and great he, lying thus in state.—
How o'er ye when
Dead, my lords and gentlemen!
—James Whitcomb Riley.
 
John Armitage lingered in New York for a week, not to press the Claibornes too closely, then went to Washington. He wrote himself down on the register of the New American as John Armitage, Cinch Tight, Montana, and took a of rooms high up, with an outlook that swept Pennsylvania Avenue. It was on the evening of a bright April day that he thus established himself; and after he had his he stood long at the window and watched the lights leap out of the dusk over the city. He was in Washington because Shirley Claiborne lived there, and he knew that even if he wished to do so he could no longer throw an air of inadvertence into his meetings with her. He had been very lonely in those days when he first saw her abroad; the sight of her had lifted his mood of depression; and now, after those hours at sea, his coming to Washington had been .
 
Many things passed through his mind as he stood at the open window. His life, he felt, could never be again as it had been before, and he sighed deeply as he recalled his talk with the old prime minister at Geneva. Then he laughed quietly as he remembered Chauvenet and Durand and the dark house on the Boulevard Froissart; but the further recollection of the attack made on his life on the deck of the King Edward sobered him, and he turned away from the window impatiently. He had seen the sick second-cabin passenger leave the steamer at New York, but had taken no trouble either to watch or to avoid him. Very likely the man was under instructions, and had been told to follow the Claibornes home; and the thought of their identification with himself by his enemies angered him. Chauvenet was likely to appear in Washington at any time, and would seek the Claibornes at once. The fact that the man was a scoundrel might, in some circumstances, have afforded Armitage comfort, but here again Armitage's mood grew dark. Jules Chauvenet was undoubtedly a of a shrewd and dangerous type; but who, pray, was John Armitage?
 
The bell in his entry rang, and he flashed on the lights and opened the door.
 
"Well, I like this! Setting yourself up here in gloomy and never saying a word. You never deserved to have any friends, John Armitage!"
 
"Jim Sanderson, come in!" Armitage grasped the hands of a red-bearded giant of forty, the possessor of alert brown eyes and a big voice.
 
"It's my rural habit of reading the register every night in search of that brings me here. They said they guessed you were in, so I just came up to see whether you were opening a game or had come to a claim past the watch-dog of the ."
 
The caller threw himself into a chair and rolled a fat, unlighted cigar about in his mouth. "You're a peach, all right, and as offensively hale and handsome as ever. When are you going to the ?"
 
"Well, not just immediately; I want to sample the flesh-pots for a day or two."
 
"You're getting soft,—that's what's the matter with you! You're afraid of the spring on the Montana range. Well, I'll admit that it's rather more diverting here."
 
"There is no debating that, Senator. How do you like being a statesman? It was so sudden and all that. I read an awful roast of you in an English paper. They took your election to the Senate as another evidence of the complete domination of our politics by the plutocrats."
 
Sanderson .
 
"The papers have rather skinned me; but on the whole, I'll do very well. They say it isn't respectable to be a senator these days, but they oughtn't to hold it up against a man that he's rich. If the Lord put silver in the mountains of Montana and let me dig it out, it's nothing against me, is it?"
 
"Decidedly not! And if you want to invest it in a senatorship it's the
Lord's hand again."
"Why sure!" and the Senator from Montana winked once more. "But it's expensive. I've got to be elected again next winter—I'm only filling out Billings' term—and I'm not sure I can go up against it."
 
"But you are nothing if not unselfish. If the good of the country demands it you'll not , if I know you."
 
"There's hot water heat in this hotel, so please turn off the hot air. I saw your foreman in Helena the last time I was out there, and he was sober. I mention the fact, knowing that I'm my reputation for , but it's the Lord's truth. Of course you spent Christmas at the old home in England—one of those yule-log and plum-pudding Christmases you read of in novels. You Englishmen—"
 
"My dear Sanderson, don't call me English! I've told you a dozen times that I'm not English."
 
"So you did; so you did! I'd forgotten that you're so damned sensitive about it;" and Sanderson's eyes regarded Armitage intently for a moment, as though he were trying to recall some previous discussion of the young man's nativity.
 
"I offer you free swing at the bar, Senator. May I summon a Montana ? You taught me the ingredients once—three dashes orange bitters; two dashes acid phosphate; half a jigger of whisky; half a jigger of Italian vermuth. You undermined the constitutions of half Montana with that mess."
 
Sanderson reached for his hat with sudden dejection.
 
"The sprinkling cart for me! I've got a nerve specialist engaged by the year to keep me out of sanatoriums. See here, I want you to go with us to-night to the Secretary of State's push. Not many of the Montana boys get this far from home, and I want you for exhibition purposes. Say, John, when I saw Cinch Tight, Montana, written on the register down there it increased my circulation seven beats! You're all right, and I guess you're about as good an American as they make—anywhere—John Armitage!"
 
The function for which the senator from Montana provided an invitation for Armitage was a large affair in honor of several new ambassadors. At ten o'clock Senator Sanderson was introducing Armitage right and left as one of his representative constituents. Armitage and he owned adjoining in Montana, and Sanderson called upon his neighbor to stand up boldly for their state before the of .
 
Mrs. Sanderson had asked Armitage to return to her for a little Montana talk, as she put it, after the first rush of their entrance was over, and as he waited in the drawing-room for an opportunity of speaking to her, he chatted with Franzel, an attaché of the Austrian embassy, to whom Sanderson had introduced him. Franzel was a gloomy young man with a monocle, and he was waiting for a particular girl, who happened to be the daughter of the Spanish Ambassador. And, this being his object, he had chosen his position with care, near the door of the drawing-room, and Armitage shared for the moment the advantage that lay in the Austrian's point of view. Armitage had half expected that the Claibornes would be present at a function as comprehensive of the higher official world as this, and he intended asking Mrs. Sanderson if she knew them as soon as opportunity offered. The Austrian attaché proved , and Armitage was about to drop him, when suddenly he caught sight of Shirley Claiborne at the far end of the broad hall. Her head was turned partly toward him; he saw her for an instant through the ; then his eyes fell upon Chauvenet at her side, talking with liveliest . He was not more than her own height, and his profile presented the clean, sharp effect of a cameo. The vivid outline of his dark face held Armitage's eyes; then as Shirley passed on through an opening in the crowd her escort turned, holding the way open for her, and Armitage met the man's gaze.
 
It was with an accented gravity that Armitage nodded his head to some declaration of the attaché at this moment. He had known when he left Geneva that he had not done with Jules Chauvenet; but the man's prompt appearance surprised Armitage. He ran over the names of the steamers by which Chauvenet might easily have sailed from either a German or a French port and reached Washington quite as soon as himself. Chauvenet was in Washington, at any rate, and not only there, but socially accepted and in the good graces of Shirley Claiborne.
 
The attaché was speaking of the Japanese.
 
"They must be crushed—crushed," said Franzel. The two had been in French.
 
"Yes, he must be crushed," returned Armitage absent-mindedly, in
English; then, remembering himself, he repeated the affirmation in
French, changing the pronoun.
Mrs. Sanderson was now free. She was a pretty, woman, much younger than her stalwart husband,—a college graduate whom he had found teaching school near one of his silver mines.
 
"Welcome once more, ! We're proud to see you, I can tell you. Our host owns some marvelous and they're hung out to-night for the world to see." She guided Armitage toward the Secretary's gallery on an upper floor. Their host was almost as famous as a as for his achievements in , and the gallery was a large apartment in which every article of furniture, as well as the paintings, tapestries and of , was the careful choice of a cultivated taste.
 
"It isn't merely an art gallery; it's the most beautiful room in
America," murmured Mrs. Sanderson.
"I can well believe it. There's my favorite Vibert,—I wondered what had become of it."
 
"It isn't surprising that the Secretary is making a great reputation by his dealings with foreign powers. It's a poor ambassador who could not be persuaded after an hour in this splendid room. The ordinary affairs of life should not be mentioned here. A king's coronation would not be out of place,&mda............