plunged suddenly into a bath of golden air. Vaguely disturbed, he drew back and tried to appear dignified in spite of the fluttering pigeon. He had no inclination for a flirtation with the Governor's daughter—intuitively he felt that such an adventure would not be a safe one; but if a flirtation were what she wanted, he told himself, with a sense of impending doom, "there might be trouble." He didn't know what she meant, but whatever it was, she evidently meant it with determination. Already she had impressed him with the quality which, for want of a better word, he thought of as "wildness." It was a quality which he had found strangely, if secretly, alluring, and he acknowledged now that this note of "wildness," of unexpectedness, of "something different" in her personality, had held his gaze chained to the airy flutter of her scarlet skirt. He felt vaguely troubled. Something as intricate and bewildering as impulse was winding through the smoothly beaten road of his habit of thought. The noises of the city came to him as if they floated over an immeasurable distance of empty space. Through the spectral boughs of the sycamores the golden sky had faded to the colour of ashes. And both the empty space and the ashen sky seemed to be not outside of himself, but a part of the hidden country within his mind.

"You were at the ball," she burst out suddenly, as if she had been holding back the charge from the beginning.

"At the ball?" he repeated, and the words were spoken with his lips merely in that objective world of routine and habit. "Yes, I was there. It was a dull business."

She laughed again with the lack of merriment he had noticed before. Though her face was made for laughter, there was an oddly conflicting note of tragedy in her voice. "Was it dull? I didn't notice."

"Then you must have enjoyed it?"

"But you were there. You saw what happened. Every one must have seen." Her savage candour brushed away the flimsy amenities. He knew now that she would say whatever she pleased, and, with the pigeon clasped tightly in his arms, he waited for anything that might come.

"You pretend that you don't know, that you didn't see!" she asked indignantly.

As she looked at him he thought—or it may have been the effect of the shifting light—that her eyes diffused soft green rays beneath her black eyelashes. Was there really the mist of tears in her sparkling glance?

"I am sorry," he said simply, being a young man of few words when the need of speech was obvious. The last thing he wanted, he told himself, was to receive the confidences of the Governor's daughter.

At this declaration, so characteristic of his amiable temperament, her anger flashed over him. "You were not sorry. You know you were not, or you would have made them kinder!"

"Kinder? But how could I?" He felt that her rage was making her unreasonable. "I didn't know you. I hadn't even been introduced to you." It was on the tip of his tongue to add, "and I haven't been yet—" but he checked himself in fear of unchaining the lightning. It was all perfectly true. He had not even been introduced to the girl, and here she was, as crude as life and as intemperate, accusing him of indifference and falsehood. And after all, what had they done to her? No one had been openly rude. Nothing had been said, he was sure, absolutely nothing. It had been a "charity entertainment," and the young people of his set had merely left her alone, that was all. The affair had been far from exclusive—for the enterprising ladies of the Beech Tree Day Nursery had prudently preferred a long subscription list to a limited social circle—and in a gathering so obscurely "mixed" there were, without doubt, a number of Gideon Vetch's admirers. Was it maliciously arranged by Fate that Patty Vetch's social success should depend upon the people who had elected her father to office?

"As if that mattered!"

Her scorn of his subterfuge, her mocking defiance of the sacred formula to which he deferred, awoke in him an unfamiliar and pleasantly piquant sensation. Through it all he was conscious of the inner prick and sting of his disapprobation, as if the swift attraction had passed into a mental aversion.

"As if that mattered!" he echoed gaily, "as if that mattered at all!"

Her face changed in the twilight, and it seemed to him that he saw her for the first time with the peculiar vividness that came only in dreams or in the hidden country within his mind. The sombre arch of the sky, the glimmer of lights far away, the clustering shadows against the white field of snow, the vague ghostly shapes of the sycamores—all these things endowed her with the potency of romantic adventure. In the winter night she seemed to him to exhale the roving sweetness of spring. Then she spoke, and the sharp brightness of his vision was clouded by the old sense of unreality.

"They treated me as if I were a piece of bunting or a flower in a pot," she said. "They left me alone in the dressing-room. No one spoke to me, though they must have known who I was. They know, all of them, that I am the Governor's daughter."

With a start he brought himself back from the secret places. "But I thought you carried your head very high," he answered, "and you did not appear to lack partners." Some small ironic demon that seemed to dwell in his brain and yet to have no part in his real thought, moved him to add indiscreetly: "I thought you danced every dance with Julius Gershom. That's the name of that dark fellow who's a politician of doubtful cast, isn't it?"

She made a petulant gesture, and the red wings in her hat vibrated like the wings of a bird in flight. There flashed though his mind while he watched her the memory of a cardinal he had seen in a cedar tree against the snow-covered landscape. Strange that he could never get away from the thought of a bird when he looked at her.

"Oh, Julius Gershom! I despise him!"

She shivered, and he asked with a sympathy he had not displayed for mental discomforts: "Aren't you dreadfully chilled? This kind of thing is a risk, you know. You might catch influenza—or anything."

"Yes, I might, if there is any about," she replied tartly, and he saw with relief that her petulance had faded to dull indifference. "I was obliged to dance with somebody," she resumed after a minute, "I couldn't sit against the wall the whole evening, could I? And nobody else asked me,—but I don't like him any the better for that."

"And your father? Does he dislike him also?" he asked.

"How can one tell? He says he is useful." There was a playful tenderness in her voice.

"Useful? You mean in politics?"

She laughed. "How else in the world can any one be useful to Father? It must be freezing."

"No, it is melting; but it is too cold to play about out of doors."

"Your teeth are chattering!" she rejoined with scornful merriment.

"They are not," he retorted indignantly. "I am as comfortable as you are."

"Well, I'm not comfortable at all. Something—I don't know what it was—happened to my ankle. I think I twisted it when I fell."

"And all this time you haven't said a word. We've talked about nothing while you must have been in pain."

She shook her head as if his new solicitude irritated her, and a quiver of pain—or was it amusement?—crossed her lips. "It isn't the first time I've had to grit my teeth and bear things—but it's getting worse instead of better all the time, and I'm afraid I shall have to ask you to help me up the hill. I was waiting until I thought I could manage it by myself."

So that was why she had kept him! She had hoped all the time that she could go on presently without his aid, and she realized now that it was impossible. Insensibly his judgment of her softened, as if his romantic imagination had spun iridescent cobwebs about her. By Jove, what pluck she had shown, what endurance! There came to him suddenly the realization that if she had learned to treat a sprained ankle so lightly, it could mean only that her