n the table. The Secretary of State could not understand
why the Governor agreed in so half-hearted a way when he urged with
eloquence the victim's speedy sacrifice. Finally, the august master of
the house growing more and more distrait, he suddenly rose, and picking
up the crumpled paper--

"Gentlemen, will you have the goodness to excuse me for five minutes?"
he said. "It is most annoying, but I cannot give my mind to business
until I attend to the matter on which Jackson interrupted us. I beg a
thousand pardons--I shall only keep you a moment."

The dignitaries left cooling their heels looked at each other blankly,
but the Lieutenant-Governor smiled cheerfully.

"One of the reasons he is Governor at thirty-six is that he always does
attend to the matters that interrupt him."

Meanwhile the Governor, rushing out with his usual impulsive energy, had
sent two or three servants flying over the house. "Where's Mrs. Mooney?
Send Mrs. Mooney to me here instantly--and be quick;" and he waited,
impatient, although it was for only three minutes, in a little room
across the hall, where appeared to him in that time a square-shaped,
gray-haired woman with a fresh face and blue eyes full of intelligence
and kindliness.

"Mary, look here;" and the big Governor put his hand on the stout little
woman's arm and drew her to the light. Mary and his Excellency were
friends of very old standing indeed, their intimacy having begun
thirty-five years before, when the future great man was a rampant baby,
and Mary his nurse and his adorer, which last she was still. "I want to
read you this, and then I want you to telephone to Bristol at once." He
smoothed out the wrinkled single sheet of paper.

"My dear Governor Rudd," he read,--"My friends the McNaughtons of
Bristol are friends of yours too, I think, and that is my reason for
troubling you with this note. I am on my way to visit them now, and
expected to take the train for Bristol at twenty minutes after eight
to-night, but when I reached here at eight o'clock I found the
time-table had been changed, and the train had gone out twenty minutes
before. And there is no other till to-morrow. I don't know what to do or
where to go, and you are the only person in the city whose name I know.
Would it trouble you to advise me where to go for the night--what hotel,
if it is right for me to go to a hotel? With regret that I should have
to ask this of you when you must be busy with great affairs a