by the name of friend! I can't help
him. All I can do, as I said before, is to turn to you, whom I love
better than all the world, and ask you to save him, in my stead. Ah,
boy, boy!--I've given you all I refused to him, taken at your hands all
I put away at his. You can afford to be generous!"

The Lieutenant-Governor came slowly toward her, and, placing his hands
upon her shoulders, looked her in the eyes.

"Dearest and Most Beautiful," he said tenderly, "you are right. I
hope--I believe--that you were overwrought, fanciful, that it is not
true. But if it is, if Cavendish is begging in our streets, then, so
surely as I am Lieutenant-Governor of Alleghenia, I will pull him out of
them, and make a man of him, if it takes a month and every police
officer and detective in Kenton City to find him. And that not alone for
your sake, tenderest-hearted, but for mine. I _can_ afford to be
generous, God bless your sweet face, I can indeed!"

And he bent over reverently, and kissed her hand.

IV

AS BETWEEN FRIENDS

There were but two guests at the Rathbawnes' dinner-table that night,
the Lieutenant-Governor and Colonel Amos Broadcastle, a veteran of the
Rebellion, brevetted Major for conspicuous gallantry at Lookout
Mountain, and now commanding officer of the Ninth Regiment, N. G. A.,
the crack militia organization of Kenton City. Colonel Broadcastle had
seen his sixty-five, but his broad, square shoulders, his rigid
carriage, and his black hair, even now only slightly touched with gray,
clipped twenty years from his appearance. His eye was one that was
famous throughout the Alleghenia Guard,--an eye accustomed to control,
not a single man, or two, or three, but a thousand, moving as one at his
command; an eye enforcing obedience immediate, machine-like, and
unquestioning.

It had been a momentous day for the Ninth when Amos Broadcastle,
retiring from the staff of a former Governor, had accepted, first a
majority therein, and then, three months later, its colonelcy. He found
ten companies, in no one instance exceeding twenty files front. He found
a field and staff vain, incompetent, and jealous; company officers
deficient alike in their knowledge of tactics and in their conception of
their responsibilities; sergeants, corporals, and lances chosen without
any view to fitness, and ignorant and tyrannical in their positions; and
finally, the rank and file lazy, untidy, and frankly contemptuous of the
school of the