“I understand you perfectly, Senator,” replied Thorndyke, with equal coolness, “and though I admit I think it a shameful state of affairs that any organisation or any man should have the power to dispose of any man’s political future, yet it is a fixed fact in our State and can’t be helped for the present. So far as your personal kindness to me goes I have the deepest sense of it, and the chances are, on the strength of what you have just said, that I may one day be senator.” “And when you are you won’t be as much down on the State organisation as you are now,” remarked Senator Standiford, beginning to climb the marble steps. “You will probably be called a boss yourself.” “No, I shall not,” answered Thorndyke. “I shouldn’t have the heart to put men through the mill as I have seen you and Senator Bicknell and a few others do.” Senator Standiford professed to regard this as a pleasantry, and so they entered the Capitol together. The day was the regular one for the meeting of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and there was a full attendance, every member being prompt except the chairman. Ten minutes after the hour struck, Crane entered. It was almost impossible for a man to have had the personal triumph he had enjoyed the day before, without showing some consciousness of it. Thorndyke had expected to see Crane crowing like chanticleer. Instead, he was remarkably quiet and subdued. He was greeted with the chaff which senators and representatives indulge in after the manner of collegians. Several members addressed him as the “Wondrous Boy,” and others, displaying copies of the Indianapolis editorial, presented their claims to him for cabinet places and embassies. One member--the Honourable Mark Antony Hudgins, a colleague of Crane’s, who posed as a greenhorn and was really a wit--solemnly engaged Thorndyke to write him a speech to deliver at the first seasonable opportunity, but warned him not to make it too much like the speech of the “Wondrous Boy.” Thorndyke laughed. He had taken no part in the joking and chaffing. Crane’s face flushed. He did not like to be reminded of Thorndyke’s share in his success, but he was too considerable a man to deny it. The meeting was brief and devoted to routine matters. The debate would begin directly after the morning hour, and it was supposed it would go along smoothly. There was, it is true, an able and malevolent person from Massachusetts who would be likely to stick a knife between the joints of Crane’s armour, and two or three Southern members who would be certain to discover an infringement of the Constitution of the United States in something or other--but these were only the expected rough spots in an otherwise smooth road.