semblance of a woman. He
devised excursions on the river and pilgrimages to historic spots about
the city and the countryside, acquiring strange antiquarian lore of the
Schuyler house, the Van Rensselaer mansion, and the Vanderheyden
Palace, and, more curious still, a perception of his deep capacity for
affection. This child of the Hilliards' better selves, with her
father's frankness, her mother's earlier beauty, and with a winsomeness
all her own, awoke his slumbering instinct of fatherhood.

The wholesome new relation quickened his insight amazingly. He divined
that however much the girl might care for these wayside rambles with
him, her youth must still crave youth, and in this strait he turned to
Mrs. Van Dam, who forthwith became Milicent's captive, too, and a fairy
godmother into the bargain. So Shelby came much to frequent a
vine-screened upper veranda off Mrs. Van Dam's library, where she was
fond of serving coffee after dinner, and one could dip down over the
red roofs and tree-tops to the stripling Hudson changing its coat of
many colors in the sunset. As this corner was a haunt of Canon
North's, also, it fell out that a friendship sprang up between the men
which strengthened into intimacy. Shelby had never dreamed of making
friends with a clergyman. The sectarian college had put him out of
joint with priestery. But North was in a class by himself. He had no
sacerdotal air or jargon--that negative virtue was his earliest
passport; and he was from crown to sole a robust manly man. The
governor took to dropping into the canon's book-lined study near the
cathedral after office hours, and North would come to the executive
mansion and smoke half the night away; for the canon was a judge of
tobacco no less than men. Not once in their intercourse did he mention
church-going or creeds; he did not "talk religion." Yet, whatever the
canon's religion was, Shelby was aware that he lived it. The air was
full of little stories of his helpfulness of the sort people told of a
man North once alluded to as "Saint" Phillips Brooks.

Milicent went to the Catskills late in August as the guest of a school
friend, and after a day or two of novel loneliness, the governor
decided to carry out a recently formed plan for supplementing the work
of his committee with a personal inspection of a part of the canal
system. As it seemed to him that he could get at the best results by
quiet means, his journey was presented to th