laborers, to a man, went on strike. Aura applauded. Osmun sulked.

Clive came to the rescue, as ever he had done when his brother’s actions had aroused ill-feeling. He rode over to Canobie and was closeted for three hours with Osmun. Servants, passing the library, heard and reported the hum of arguing voices. Then Clive came out and rode home. Next morning Osmun lowered the rents and restored wages to their old scale. As usual, the resultant popularity descended on Clive and not upon himself.

It was a week afterward that Thaxton Vail chanced to meet Osmun at the Aura Country Club. Osmun stumped up to him, as Vail sat on the veranda rail waiting for Doris Lane to come to the tennis courts.

[27]“I was blackballed, yesterday, by the Stockbridge Hunt Club,” announced Creede, with no other salutation.

[27]

“I’m sorry,” said Thaxton, politely.

“I hear, on good authority, that it was you who blackballed me,” continued Osmun, his spectacled eyes glaring wrathfully on his neighbor. “And I’ve come to ask why you did it. In fact, I demand to know why.”

“I’m disobedient, by nature,” said Thaxton, idly. “So if I had blackballed you, I’d probably refuse to obey your ‘demand.’ But as it happened, I didn’t blackball you. I wasn’t even at the Membership Committee’s meeting.”

“I hear, on good authority, that you blackballed me,” insisted Osmun, his glare abating not at all.

“And I tell you, on better authority, that I didn’t,” returned Thaxton with a lazy calm that irked the angry man all the more.

“Then who did?” mouthed Osmun. “I’ve a right to know. I mean to get to the bottom of this. If a club, like the Stockbridge Hunt, blackballs a man of my standing, I’ll know why. I—”

“I believe the proceedings of Membership Committee meetings are supposed to be confidential,”[28] Thaxton suggested. “Why not take your medicine?”

[28]

“I still believe it was you who blackballed me!” flamed Osmun. “I had it from—”

“You have just had it from me that I didn’t,” interposed Thaxton, a thread of ice running through his pleasant voice. “Please let it go at that.”

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