It took an hour and a half to elect the next four men,--an hour and a half of eulogy, discussion, diplomacy, compromise,--although, as time went on, the increasing indifference of the majority of the fellows as to who got in tended to reduce the election here and there, among those who really cared, to the process of voting “for your man, if you’ll vote for mine.” Not that the arrangement did away with animated electioneering in different corners of the room, and vehement arguments that might never have ended had not some weary outsider called attention to the fact that they had long since ceased to have any bearing on anything. But it gave a coercive publicity to pigheadedness in various quarters that made a Third Seven possible. At midnight, five men had been elected, two places remained unfilled, and the list of candidates numbered four. Then, by a curious revulsion of feeling no one sought to explain, three of the names that had hung on with a fair chance of success until that late hour, were unmercifully black-balled in rapid succession and thrown out. This left but one candidate--a man named Leonard--and two vacancies. The hat went around again bringing back to the desk, among twelve other cards, the ace of spades and the queen of clubs. Two black-balls, if persisted in, kept a man out of the Signet. “Now we’ll have to think up some one else. Oh, Lord!” yawned Haviland. “Leonard has had two black for hours; I think he’s hopeless. Somebody suggest somebody else.” Ellis glanced at Haydock as much as to say, “Now’s your time.” He had been doing that, off and on, all evening, until Haydock at last refused to look in his direction. Haydock was on the point of attempting something rather impossible, and he didn’t propose to ruin his chance of success at the outset, merely by being ill-timed. He had decided a week before,--as soon as the postal cards calling for an election were sent out,--that he wanted Sears Wolcott on the Signet. His reasons for getting Sears there were not obvious, and Haydock appreciated the difficulties that lay in the way of making them appear so, or of giving any reasons at all other than that he wanted him. His best motives for wishing to “buck” Sears in were hardly formulated in his own mind; he couldn’t very well undertake to make them clear to others, even if they would have carried with them any weight,--which they wouldn’t have. He was influenced wholly by the same feeling for Wolcott--a mixture of admiration and fond disapproval--that had led him the year before to do what he could to interest The Magnificent One in Barrows’s unfortunate. The little experiment had done something for Wolcott,--a good that perhaps only Haydock and Wolcott’s sister appreciated as yet, but something that was, nevertheless, worth while. Wolcott’s horizon had given a little here and there; Wolcott himself was somewhat less intolerant; he had ceased noticeably, to Haydock at least, to be