Mr. Slade, while welcoming him with both hands, was not so cheering. The financial and political situations were no better, he said. They had really become more alarming every day. The repudiation of Northern accounts by Southern merchants had ceased--at least some of Morton, Slade & Co.'s customers had redeemed their obligations and had forwarded them their overdue remittances, tiding them over for a time--but no one could say what was in store for any firm whose business lay largely in the Southern States. He would, however, make his word good. Oliver's situation was still open, and he could again occupy his desk as soon as he returned from Kennedy Square. The length of his service depended entirely on whether the country would go to war or whether its difficulties could be satisfactorily settled in the next Congress. But none of these things--none of the more depressing ones--dulled for an instant the purpose or chilled the enthusiasm of our young lover. Wars, pestilence, financial panics and even social tidal-waves might overwhelm the land and yet not one drop of the topmost edge of the flood could wet the tips of his high-stepping toes: Margaret was his; he trod an enchanted realm. An enthusiasm of equal intensity, but of quite a different kind, had taken possession of the Horn mansion as the hour of Oliver's arrival approached, as anyone would have noticed who happened to be inside its hospitable walls. Something out of the common was about to happen. There was an unusual restlessness in Malachi totally at variance with his grave and dignified demeanor. His perturbation was so great that he even forgot the time-honored custom of wheeling his master's chair into position and the equally time-honored salutation of "yo' chair's all ready, Marse Richard." It was noticed, too, that he could not keep out of the hall. Richard had to speak to him twice and Mrs. Horn had lifted her head in astonishment when that hitherto attentive darky handed her Richard's spectacles instead of her own. Or he would start to enter the dining-room, his hands laden with plates, or the library, his arms filled with logs to replenish the fire, and then stop suddenly and listen with one foot raised, standing like an old dog locating a partridge. So nervous did he become as the twilight deepened, and he began to set the table for supper, that he dropped a cup, smashing it into atoms, a thing that had not happened to him before in twenty years--one of the blue and gilt--priceless heirlooms in the family, and only used when a distinguished guest was expected. At another time he would have dropped the whole tray with everything upon it, had not Aunt Hannah saved it in time. How she came to be in the pantry with her two eyes on the front door, when her place was in the kitchen with both of them on the pots and kettles, no one could tell. Everything seemed to be at sixes and sevens in the old house that night.