They were quite alone, and it might be said that the report was theirs alone. There were other strong men on the committee, but they had got used to the autocratic rule of Thorndyke, and rather liked it. He consulted them attentively, but he was always the man who acted. The new chairman recognised this, and being ambitious to rule as Thorndyke had ruled, he consulted his predecessor somewhat ostentatiously--at which his colleagues smiled and let him alone. Crane had just experienced an instance of Thorndyke’s goodwill, who was in the act of saving his chairman from making a ridiculous blunder which would have hindered his prospects very much as Oliver Goldsmith’s unlucky red coat did for him with the Bishop. The Secretary of State, a very long-headed person in a small way, had previously got the length of the Honourable Julian Crane’s foot, as the vulgar express it. He had asked Crane to play golf with him; he had invited the member from Circleville to little dinners with him. The Secretary’s wife had requested Crane as a great favour to assist her widowed daughter in chaperoning a party of débutantes and college youths to the theatre, and when a scurrilous journal had reflected grossly upon himself, a married man, and the young widow, Crane was in secret hugely flattered. To be linked, even remotely, in a scandal with the daughter of the Secretary of State was a social rise--although he happened to know that Cap’n Josh Slater, the father of the Secretary of State, had been engaged in steam-boating on the Ohio River in the wild forties with his own grandfather, Cap’n Ebenezer Crane. The Secretary’s father had made money, and his daughters were replicas of Lady Clara Vere de Vere. Of his sons, one, the present Secretary of State, had left the banks of the Ohio never to return, and by a steady evolution had passed from the Western Reserve College to Harvard, thence to Oxford for a post-graduate course, to Berlin as attaché to the then Legation, thence home to exercise a gift the politicians had found in him, viz., the power to form a silk-stocking contingent in the party to offset the silk stockings in the opposition. Being a man of some brains and much perseverance, he had reached the most highly ornamental position in the Government of the United States--the Secretaryship of State. He maintained it with dignity. He had, of course, long since, abjured the Methodist faith, in which he was reared, and was as uncompromising a Churchman as his brother, the Episcopal Bishop--for such had been the career of the steam-boat captain’s other son. Both had been brought up in an auriferous atmosphere totally denied the descendants of Cap’n Ebenezer Crane, who had lost his all in the steam-boat business, and spent his last years keeping the Circleville tavern. Crane knew all about this, one of his grandfather’s standing quarrels with Fate being that Josh Slater, a durned fool, and a rascal besides, in Cap’n