There was no news from Tyre next day save that Mr. Beekman of Jay was also a candidate, and that the Convention was in a deadlock. The second day, along with the news announcement that the Convention, after seventy-odd fruitless ballots, had adjourned for a week, came a despatch from Albert begging Seth to visit the farm for a couple of days, and talk the thing over, before the _Chronicle_ took action. Upon consultation with Mr. Workman Seth replied that this was impossible, owing to the necessities of his work. Then there came a letter from Albert, brief, but very much to the point. “_DEAR Brother: I am sorry if your work must suffer by your coming to me, but I think I have a claim upon you superior to even that of the _Chronicle_. If I have not, I ought to have. I decline to believe that, if you represent the matter to him as really imperative, my former friend, Mr. Workman, will place any obstacles in your way. But if he does I still insist that your choice between him and me must be a final one. I do not write a word to you about gratitude. I simply say, be here at the farm on Sunday--or never again._ “_Albert_.” After this there was nothing to do but for Seth to telegraph that he would come. CHAPTER XIX.--THE WELCOME. When Seth walked over from the Thessaly station, Sunday forenoon, to the farm, he was not, it may be imagined, in a placid frame of mind. There lay before him an interview with his brother which could not, in the nature of things, be pleasant, and which might very easily be distinctly unpleasant. It was his duty to say sundry things to Albert which were not in themselves nice, and if Albert was still in the mood shown forth by his peremptory letter, these remarks would very likely produce a scene. Seth was in no sense afraid of his brother, nor had the thrifty thought that this brother was a rich, childless man, to offend whom would be a gratuitous economic blunder, ever entered his head. The youngster had no faculty whatever for financial prudence. But he was grateful--almost ridiculously grateful--by nature. The trait is not a rare one, even in these days when a new civilization has substituted for individual patronage and beneficence the thanks-to-nobody trade-unionism of universal conceit and rivalry, but it was abnormally developed in the youngest of the Fairchilds. He said to himself, as he crossed the fields toward the white and red land-mark of house and barns on the side hill, that he owed everything in the world to this brother. Whatever there might be in his public attitude to condemn, however pernicious his politics might be, still it was his fraternal feeling and generosity which had created the vast gulf between Seth the plow-yokel and Seth the editor. These reflections brought no comfort to the young man.