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,