CHAPTER XXI.
THE CAMPAIGN.
Miss Fanny Newt went to Saratoga with a perfectly clear idea of what she intended to do.

She intended to be engaged to Mr.Alfred Dinks.
That young gentleman was a second cousin of Hope Wayne's, and his mother had never objected to his little visits at Pinewood, when both he and Hope were young, and when the unsophisticated human heart is flexible as melted wax, and receives impressions which only harden with time.
"Let the children play together, my dear," she said, in conjugal seclusion to her husband, the Hon.

Budlong Dinks, who needed only sufficient capacity and a proper opportunity to have been one of the most distinguished of American diplomatists.

He thought he was such already.
There was, indeed, plenty of diplomacy in the family, and that most skillful of all diplomatic talents, the management of distinguished diplomatists, was not unknown there.
Fanny Newt had made the proper inquiries.

The result was that there were rumors--"How _do_ such stories start ?" asked Mrs.Budlong Dinks of all her friends who were likely to repeat the rumor--that it was a family understanding that Mr.Alfred Dinks and his cousin Hope were to make a match.