short life had been full of misadventures beside which a sprained ankle appeared trivial. She could "play the game" so perfectly, he grasped, because she had been obliged either to play it or go under ever since she had been big enough to read the cards in her hand. To be "a good sport" was perhaps the best lesson that the world had yet taught her. Though she could not be, he decided, more than eighteen, she had acquired already the gay bravado of the experienced gambler with life.

"Let me help you," he said eagerly, "I am sure that I can carry you, you are so small. If you will only let me throw away this confounded bird, I can manage it easily."

"No, give it to me. It would die of cold if we left it." She stretched out her hand, and in silence he gave her the wounded pigeon. Her tenderness for the bird, conflicting as it did with his earlier impression of her, both amused and perplexed him. He couldn't reconcile her quick compassion with her resentful and mocking attitude toward himself.

At his impulsive offer of help the quiver shook her lips again, and stooping over she did something which appeared to him quite unnecessary to one gray suede shoe. "No, it isn't as bad as that. I don't need to be carried," she said. "That sort of thing went out of fashion ages ago. If you'll just let me lean on you until I get up the hill."

She put her hand through his arm; and while he walked slowly up the hill, he decided that, taken all in all, the present moment was the most embarrassing one through which he had ever lived. The fugitive gleam, the romantic glamour, had vanished now. He wondered what it was about her that he had at first found attractive. It was the spirit of the place, he decided, nothing more. With every step of the way there closed over him again his natural reserve, his unconquerable diffidence, his instinctive recoil from the eccentric in behaviour. Conventions were the breath of his young nostrils, and yet he was passing through an atmosphere, without, thank Heaven, his connivance or inclination, where it seemed to him the hardiest convention could not possibly survive. When the lights of the mansion shone nearer through the bared boughs, he heaved a sigh of relief.

"Have I tired you?" asked the girl in response, and the curious lilting note in her voice made him turn his head and glance at her in sudden suspicion. Had she really hurt herself, or was she merely indulging some hereditary streak of buffoonery at his expense? It struck him that she would be capable of such a performance, or of anything else that invited her amazing vivacity. His one hope was that he might leave her in some obscure corner of the house, and slip away before anybody capable of making a club joke had discovered his presence. The hidden country was lost now, and with it the perilous thrill of enchantment.

He rang the bell, and the door was opened by an old coloured butler who had been one of the family servants of the Culpepers. How on earth, Stephen wondered, could the Governor tolerate the venerable Abijah, the chosen companion of Culpeper children for two generations? While he wondered he recalled something his mother had said a few weeks ago about Abijah's having been lured away by the offer of absurd wages. "You needn't worry," she had added shrewdly, "he will return as soon as he gets tired of working."

"I hurt my ankle, Abijah," said the girl.

"You ain't, is you, Miss Patty?" replied Abijah, in an indulgent tone which conveyed to Stephen's delicate ears every shade of difference between the Vetchs' and the Culpepers' social standing.

"How are you, Abijah?" remarked the young man with the air of lordly pleasantry he used to all servants who were not white. Beyond the fine old hall he saw the formal drawing-room and the modern octagonal dining-room at the back of the house.

"Howdy, Marse Stephen," responded the negro, "I seed yo' ma yestiddy en she sutney wuz lookin well an' peart."

He opened the door of the library, and while Stephen entered the room with the girl's hand on his arm, a man rose from a chair by the fire and came forward.

"Father, this is Mr. Culpeper," remarked Patty calmly, as she sank on a sofa and stretched out her frivolous shoes.

In the midst of his embarrassment Stephen wondered resentfully how she had discovered his name.

CHAPTER II

GIDEON VETCH

"Your daughter slipped on the ice," explained the young man, while the thought flashed through his mind that Patty's father was accepting it all, with ironical humour, as some queer masquerade.

It was the first time that Stephen had come within range of the Governor's personal influence, and he found himself waiting curiously for the response of his sympathies or his nerves. Once or twice he had heard Vetch speak—a storm of words which had played freely from the lightning flash of humorous invective to the rolling thunder of passionate denunciation. Such sound and fury had left Stephen the one unmoved man in the audience. He had been brought up on the sonorous rhetoric and the gorgeous purple periods of the classic orations; and the mere undraped sincerity—the raw head and bloody bones eloquence, as he put it, of Vetch's speech had been as offensive to his taste as it had been unconvincing to his intelligence. The man was a mountebank, nothing more, Stephen had decided, and his strange power was simply the reaction of mob hysteria to the stage tricks of the political clown.

Yes, the man was a mountebank—but was he nothing more than a mountebank? Like most men of his age, Stephen Culpeper was inclined to swift impressions rather than hasty judgments of people; and he was conscious, while he listened in silence to the murmuring explanations of the girl, that the immediate effect was a sensation, not an idea. At first sight, the Governor appeared merely ordinary—a tall, rugged figure, built of good bone and muscle and sound to the core, with the look of arrested energy which was doubtless an inheritance from the circus ring. There was nothing impressive about him; nothing that would cause one to turn and look back in a crowd. What struck one most was his air of extraordinary freshness and health, of sanguine vitality. His face was well-coloured and irregular in outline, with a high bulging forehead and thick sandy hair which was already gray on the temples. In the shadow his eyes did not appear remarkably fine; they seemed at the first glance to be of an indeterminate colour—was it blue or gray?—and there was nothing striking in their deep setting under the beetling sandy eyebrows. All this was true; and yet while Stephen looked into them over the Governor's outstretched hand, he told himself that they were the most human eyes he had ever seen. Afterward, when he groped through his vocabulary for a more accurate description, he could not find one. There was shrewdness in Gideon Vetch's eyes; there was friendliness; there was the blue sparkle of contagious humour—a ripple of light that was like visible laughter—but above all there was humanity. Though Stephen did not try to grasp the vivid impressions that passed through his mind, he felt intuitively that he had learned to know Gideon Vetch through his look and manner as well as he should have known another man after weeks or months of daily intercourse. Whatever the man's private life, whatever his political faults may have been, there was magic in the clasp of his hand and the cordial glow of his smile. He was always responsive; he stood always on the same level, high or low, with his companion of the moment: he was as incapable of looking up as he was of looking down; he was equally without reverence and without condescension. It was the law of his nature that he should give himself emphatically to the just and the unjust alike.

"He came home with me because I hurt my foot," Patty was saying.

Had she forgotten already, Stephen asked himself cynically, that it was not her foot but her ankle? His