He glanced at the door with a lingering hope that Mr. Meredith would appear, but of course he did not come. Then Jamie slowly hitched down the speaker’s stairs, a step at a time, and, reaching the floor, slipped over by the reporters’ boxes--empty that afternoon, for the correspondents, like the legislators, never returned until Tuesday morning--and thence into the side aisle, under the gallery, and to the cloak-room. There he got his cap, looked longingly at Mr. Meredith’s hook, empty now, with no satin-lined overcoat for him to nestle lovingly against for a blissful second, and then he went out into the hall under the huge dome. No one, of course, observed a mere page boy, but Jamie felt, as he clicked his hurrying little heels across the marble floors, that something was about to poke him in his cold, unprotected back--the fear of a rear attack that boyhood inherits from its far-distant savage ancestry. Jamie didn’t take the elevator, or the grand staircase, but reached the main floor by leaping two steps at a time down a narrow side stairway, unused and dark. Then he flew out of the east entrance, ran down the wide walk and on up Capitol Avenue for four long blocks--ran as fast as he could pump his little short legs to the hotel where he knew Mr. Meredith lived when he was at the capital. But Jamie had no hope of finding him there that afternoon. He went to the hotel simply because he did not know where else to go--that was all. Rushing into the hotel and up to the clerk’s desk, he put his chin over its edge and, as the clerk leaned down with his face almost in Jamie’s face, the boy panted: “Is--now--Honorable Bronson Meredith in?” The clerk smiled and Jamie blushed, fearing the clerk was making fun of him. And his heart sank--he might have known Mr. Meredith was not in. “Whom did you say?” asked the clerk. “Honorable Bronson Meredith--the gentleman from Cook--” The clerk was knitting his brows, though the wrinkles about his lips were twitching as if he found it hard to keep them from rippling out into smiles. Jamie thought the clerk was wonderfully stupid not to know such a great man as Mr. Meredith, and he added, in order to jog the man’s memory a little: “You know--the reformer.” The clerk straightened up, placed his hands on his hips, threw back his head and laughed. Jamie stared at him with wide eyes--he saw nothing to laugh at, especially when senate bill 578 was coming up. Presently the clerk took one of his hands from his side and dropped it on the big bell beside the register, and as it clanged out in the empty lobby, he shouted in his laughing voice: “Front!” A bell-boy in buttons slid to the desk just as a page boy does in the house when a member claps his hands. The bell-boy and Jamie looked each other all over from head to toe in the instant they stood there facing each other, and the clerk began: “Go see if Mr. Meredith--” And just then a tall form appeared around the corner of a wall, and Jamie looked up.