suspicions returned while he looked at her blooming face, and he hoped earnestly that she would not feel impelled to relate any irrelevant details of the adventure. Like Gideon Vetch on the platform she seemed incapable of withholding the smallest fragment of a fact; and the young man wondered if it were characteristic either of "the plain people," as he called them, or of circus riders as a class, that their minds should go habitually unclothed yet unashamed.

"Thank you, sir," said the Governor without effusion; and he asked: "Did you hurt yourself, Patty?" while he bent over and laid his hand on her ankle.

A note of tenderness passed into his voice as he turned to the girl; and when she answered after a minute, Stephen recognized the same tone of affectionate playfulness that she used when she spoke of him.

"Not much," she replied carelessly. Then she held out the drooping pigeon. "I found this bird. Is there anything we can do for it?"

The Governor took the bird from her, and examined it under the light with the manner of brisk confidence which directed his slightest action. The man, for all his restless activity, appeared to be without excess or exaggeration when it was a matter of practical detail. He apparently employed his whole efficient and enterprising mind on the incident of the bird.

"The wings aren't broken," he said presently, lifting his head, "but it is weak from hunger and exhaustion," and he rang the bell for Abijah. "Rice and water and a warm basket," he ordered when the old negro appeared. "You had better keep it in the house until it recovers." Then dismissing the subject, he turned back to Stephen.

"Well, I am glad to see you, Mr. Culpeper," he said. "You had a hard beginning, but, as they used to tell me when I was a kid, a hard beginning makes a good ending."

For the first time a smile softened his face, and the roving blue gleam danced blithely in his eyes. A moment before the young man had thought the Governor's face harsh and ugly. Now he remembered that the Judge had said "the man was not half bad to look at if you caught him smiling." Yes, he had a charm of his own, and that charm had swept him forward over every obstacle to the place he had reached. A single gift, indefinable yet unerring—the ability to make men believe absurdities, as John Benham had once said—and the material disadvantages of poverty and ignorance were brushed aside like trivial impediments. A strange power, and a dangerous one in unscrupulous hands, the young man reflected.

"I remember your face," pursued the Governor, while his smile faded—was brevity, after all, the secret of its magic? "You were at one of my speeches last autumn, and you sat in the front row, I think. I recall you because you were the only person in the audience who looked bored."

"I was." Frankness called for frankness. "I am not keen about speeches."

"Not even when Benham speaks?" The voice was gay, but through it all there rang the unmistakable tone of authority, of conscious power. There was one person, Stephen inferred, who had never from the beginning disparaged or ridiculed Gideon Vetch, and that person was Gideon Vetch himself. John Benham had once said that the man was a mere posturer—but John Benham was wrong.

"Oh, well, you see, Benham is different," replied the young man as delicately as he could. "He is apt to say only what I think, you know."

So far there had been no breach of good taste in the Governor's manner, no warning reminder of an origin that was certainly obscure and presumably low, no stale, dust-laden odours of the circus ring. He had looked and spoken as any man of Stephen's acquaintance might have done, facetiously, it is true, but without ostentation or vulgarity. When the break came, therefore, it was the more shocking to the younger man because he had been so imperfectly prepared for it.

"And because he is different, of course you think he'd make a better Governor than I shall," said Gideon Vetch abruptly. "That is the way with you fellows who have ossified in the old political parties. You never see a change in time to make ready for it. You wait until it knocks you in the head, and then you wake up and grumble. Now, I've been on the way for the last thirty years or so, but you never once so much as got wind of me. You think I've just happened because of too much electricity in the air, like a thunderbolt or something; but you haven't even looked back to find out whether you are right or wrong. Talk about public spirit! Why, there isn't an ounce of live public spirit left among you, in spite of all the moonshine your man Benham talks about the healing virtues of tradition and the sacred taboo of your political Pharisees. There wasn't one of you that didn't hate like the devil to see me Governor of Virginia—and yet how many of you took the trouble to find out what I am made of, or to understand what I mean? Did you even take the trouble to go to the polls and vote against me?"

Though Stephen flushed scarlet, he held his ground bravely. It was true that he had not voted—he hated the whole sordid business of politics—but then, who had ever suspected for a minute that Gideon Vetch would be elected? His brief liking for the man had changed suddenly to exasperation. It seemed incredible to him that any Governor of Virginia should display so open a disregard of the ordinary rules of courtesy and hospitality. To drag in their political differences at such a time, when he had come beneath the other's roof merely to render him an unavoidable service! To stoop to the pettifogging sophistry of the agitator simply because his opponent had reluctantly yielded him an opportunity!

"Well, I heard you speak, but that didn't change me!" he retorted with a smile.

The Governor laughed, and the sincerity of his amusement was evident even to Stephen. "Could anything short of a blasting operation change you traditional Virginians?" he inquired.

His face was turned to the fire, and the young man felt while he watched him that a piercing light was shed on his character. It was as if Stephen saw his opponent from an entirely fresh point of view, as if he beheld him for the first time with the sharp clearness which the flash of his anger produced. The very absence of all sense of dignity impressed him suddenly as the most tremendous dignity a human being could attain—the unconscious dignity of natural forces—of storms and fire and war and pestilence. Because the man never thought of how he appeared, he appeared always impregnable.

"I shall not argue," said the young man, with a smile which he endeavoured to make easy and natural. "The time for argument is over. You played trumps."

Vetch laughed. "And it wasn't my last card," he answered bluntly.

"The game isn't finished." Though Stephen's voice was light it held a quiver of irritation. "He laughs best who laughs last." The other had started the row, and, by Jove, he would give him as much as he wanted! He recalled suddenly the charges that there was more than the customary political log-rolling—that there were mysterious "discreditable dealings" in the Governor's election to office.

But it appeared in a minute that Gideon Vetch was adequate to any demand which the occasion might develop. Already Stephen was beginning to regard him less as a man than as an energetic idea, as activity incarnate.

"If you mean to imply that the laugh may be on me at the last," he returned, while the points of blue light seemed to pierce Stephen like arrows—no, like gimlets, "well, you're wrong about one part of it—for if that ever happens, I'll laugh with you because of the sheer rotten irony."

For the first time the other noticed how the Governor was dressed—in a suit of some heavy brown stuff which looked as if it had been sprinkled and needed pressing. He wore a green tie and a striped shirt of the conspicuous kind that Stephen hated. Though the younger man was keenly critical of clothes, and perseveringly informed himself regarding the smallest