tle classic of straightforwardness"; but his
king-maker aloft thought his bearing too simple by far. If he listened
to her, he would tip his presidential lightning-rod more showily.

CHAPTER V

Summer leaped a hotbed growth from spring, and Cora Shelby, tiring of
golf, the country club, and Albany's now mild pastimes, took herself
off for a round of fashionable resorts with Mrs. Tommy Kidder. The
governor had other occupations. So far as a man could do such a thing,
he put his presidential chances out of mind and bent his energies upon
a study of the canal problem, whose solving he was ambitious to make
the monument of his administration. As a legislator he had been
recognized as an authority upon this his hobby; but the knowledge of
the assemblyman was shallow beside that of the governor, who asked no
fairer laurel than to link his name with the regenerated Erie Canal as
the second Clinton had associated his name with its beginnings.

Throughout the languid heated term whose official calm only the
occasional request of a fellow governor for requisition papers
disturbed, Shelby plodded over the bewildered mass of estimates, maps,
and mazy statistics which his special committee was accumulating. A
more brilliant man doubtless would have left much of this arid drudgery
to subordinates, contenting himself with the sum of things, without a
close scrutiny of detail; but this was never Shelby's way. When he
mastered a subject it was his blood and bones, and his passion for the
Ditch transmuted its story, howsoever told, into stuff that splendid
dreams are made on and modern empires built.

Those arduous months were the happiest he had known. He toiled
mightily, but he wrought at a labor of love, while his leisure hours
fostered friendships as novel as they were attractive. Cora Shelby's
campaign of the watering-places had not embraced Milicent, and the girl
returned from school in June to find her mother already gone. She
dutifully made known her arrival in Albany, and in time deciphered from
a patchouli-scented scrawl postmarked "Bar Harbor" that Albany was an
excellent spot for her to remain.

"She says that summer hotels are no places for young girls," Milicent
told her stepfather. "Why then does mamma care about them?"

The governor was nonplussed: but he quietly set himself to make Albany
tolerable for this astonishing young person, yet scant of seventeen,
who had suddenly flowered into the outward