before encountered, and which he felt he would have some difficulty in repaying adequately when his hosts honoured him with a visit in London. Important and wealthy men implored their wives to invite Edmund Trevelyan to their social functions; but the women were intent upon the lord, and refused to give a thought to any hanger-on at the Court, so Trevelyan was forced to content himself exclusively with the society of men whom he found very much to his liking.
The sedate Peter Mackeller took no part in this round of festivities. With characteristic energy he plunged at once into the business that had brought them to America. The sixty-mile length of railway line and the rolling stock thereon, which the company had leased, was now tied up with the red tape of the insolvency proceedings, and so could not be touched either by him or by Sarsfield-Mitcham. He at once secured another piece of line on Long Island, with two locomotives, captured Sarsfield-Mitcham, who was still garrulously optimistic, quite certain that his daughter would pull him through the legal tangle in which he found himself involved—the girl was now on her way across the ocean; thus while the New York lawyers by various expedients held off the sheriff's sale, Mackeller and the inventor, with their assistants, were busily transforming the locomotives that were to accomplish the supreme test.
