Mr. Brandreth went on: “I didn’t examine the reports very attentively myself, but I think they were favorable, on the whole. There were several changes suggested: I don’t recall just what. But you can see them all on Monday. We let Miss Hughes go after lunch on Saturdays, and she generally takes some work home with her, and I gave them to her to put in shape for you. I thought it would be rather instructive for you to see the different opinions in the right form. I believe you can’t have too much method in these things.” “Of course,” said Ray, in an anguish of hope and fear. The street seemed to go round; he hardly knew where he was. He bungled on inarticulately before he could say: “I believe in method, too. But I’m sorry I couldn’t have had the reports to-day, because I might have had Sunday to think the suggestions over, and see what I could do with them.” “Well, I’m sorry, too. She hadn’t been gone half an hour when you came in. If I’d thought of your happening in! Well, it isn’t very long till Monday! She’ll have them ready by that time. I make it a rule myself to put all business out of my mind from 2 P.M. on Saturday till Monday 9 A.M., and I think you’ll find it an advantage, too. I won’t do business, and I won’t talk business, and I won’t think business after two o’clock on Saturday. I believe in making Sunday a day of rest and family enjoyment. We have an early dinner; and then I like to have my wife read or play to me, and now we have in the baby, and that amuses us.” Ray forced himself to say that as a rule he did not believe in working on Sunday either; he usually wrote letters. He abruptly asked Mr. Brandreth how he thought it would do for him to go and ask Miss Hughes for a sight of the readers’ reports in the rough. Mr. Brandreth laughed. “You _are_ anxious! Do you know where she lives?” “Oh, yes; I stopped there last Sunday with Mr. Kane on our way to the Park. I saw Mr. Chapley there.” “Oh!” said Mr. Brandreth, with the effect of being arrested by the last fact in something he might otherwise have said. It seemed to make him rather unhappy. “Then you saw Miss Hughes’s father?” “Yes; and all his friends,” Ray answered, in a way that evidently encouraged Mr. Brandreth to go on. “Yes? What did you think of them?” “I thought they were mostly harmless; but one or two of them ought to have been in the violent wards.” “Did Mr. Chapley meet them?” “Oh, no; he went away before any of them came in. As Mr. Kane took me, I had to stay with him.” Mr. Brandreth got back a good deal of his smiling complacency, which had left him at Ray’s mention of Mr. Chapley in connection with Hughes. “Mr. Chapley and Mr. Hughes are old friends.” “Yes; I understood something of that kind.” “They date back to the Brook Farm days together.”