Francis Lynde

The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush Francis Lynde

Some one was giving a dinner dance at the country club, and Blount, who was a week-endguest of the Beverleys, was ill-natured enough to be resentful. What right had a gay andfrivolous world to come and thrust its light-hearted happiness upon him when Patricia hadsaid "No"? It was like bullying a cripple, he told himself morosely, and when he had readthe single telegram which had come while he was at dinner he begged Mrs. Beverley'sindulgence and went out to find a chair in a corner of the veranda where the frivolities hadnot as yet intruded. It was a North Shore night like that in which Shakespeare has mingled moon-shadows withthe gossamer fantasies of the immortal "Dream." Though the dance was in-doors, the treeson the lawn and the road-fronting verandas of the club-house were hung with festoons ofChinese lanterns. At the carriage-entrance smart automobiles were coming and going, andone of them, with the dust of the Boston parkways on its running-gear, brought the guestsof honor-three daughters of a Western senator lately home from their summer abroad. Blount knew neither the honorers nor the honored ones, and had resolutely refused thechance offered him by Mrs. Beverley to amend his ignorance. For Patricia's "No" was notyet twenty-four hours old, and since it had changed the stars in their courses for Patricia'slover, the cataclysm was much too recent to postulate anything like a return of theheavenly bodies to their normal orbits.