he trail of a skirt without
considering the quality of its cloth.

There stood in the door a faded woman, one of the numerous
sisterhood of the unhappy. She was dressed all in black--poverty's
perpetual mourning for lost joys. Her face had the contours of
twenty and the lines of forty. She may have lived that intervening
score of years in a twelve-month. There was about her yet an aurum
of indignant, unappeased, protesting youth that shone faintly
through the premature veil of unearned decline.

"I beg your pardon, ma'am," said the commissioner, gaining his feet
to the accompaniment of a great creaking and sliding of his chair.

"Are you the governor, sir?" asked the vision of melancholy.

The commissioner hesitated at the end of his best bow, with his
hand in the bosom of his double-breasted "frock." Truth at last
conquered.

"Well, no, ma'am. I am not the governor. I have the honour to be
Commissioner of Insurance, Statistics, and History. Is there
anything, ma'am, I can do for you? Won't you have a chair, ma'am?"

The lady subsided into the chair handed her, probably from purely
physical reasons. She wielded a cheap fan--last token of gentility
to be abandoned. Her clothing seemed to indicate a reduction almost
to extreme poverty. She looked at the man who was not the governor,
and saw kindliness and simplicity and a rugged, unadorned
courtliness emanating from a countenance tanned and toughened by
forty years of outdoor life. Also, she saw that his eyes were clear
and strong and blue. Just so they had been when he used them to skim
the horizon for raiding Kiowas and Sioux. His mouth was as set and
firm as it had been on that day when he bearded the old Lion Sam
Houston himself, and defied him during that season when secession
was the theme. Now, in bearing and dress, Luke Coonrod Sandifer
endeavoured to do credit to the important arts and sciences of
Insurance, Statistics, and History. He had abandoned the careless
dress of his country home. Now, his broad-brimmed black slouch hat,
and his long-tailed "frock" made him not the least imposing of the
official family, even if his office was reckoned to stand at the
tail of the list.

"You wanted to see the governor, ma'am?" asked the commissioner,
with a deferential manner he always used toward the fair sex.

"I hardly know," said the lady, hesitatingly. "I suppose so." And
then, suddenly drawn by the sympathetic look of the other, she
poured forth the story