was angry to the core. As a lawyer alone he recoiled from
raising even temporarily to the bench a man whose activities had been
notoriously political, and his law practice innocent of a single case
in a court of record; as a husband whose ears tingled with gossip of
this same Ludlow's summer attentions to his wife, which the Boss, whom
nothing escaped, must have heard too, his hurt was shrewder. His
refusal was curt.

The Boss met the governor's move with silence, but under his own roof
Shelby had crossed a politician less self-contained. Ludlow owed his
fore-knowledge of the judicial vacancy to Cora, who flew in high
dudgeon to her husband to demand why he had refused this favor to her
valued friend.

Shelby was dumfounded.

"These affairs don't concern you," he said, after a moment's
incredulous scrutiny of her face.

"Why did you refuse to make him a judge?" she repeated hotly.

"Ludlow is a discredited political hack. I had no alternative."

"It's jealousy."

Shelby whitened.

"If you mean to press the thing into that region," he answered sternly,
"I'll own that there is an element of jealousy. I've had to open my
eyes lately to many things which concern you and Ludlow. Bar Harbor
stories, Saratoga stories, Albany stories, too, of things you've kept
from me--God knows what hasn't filtered my way. I am jealous--jealous
for your good name, and mine, and Milicent's."

She wept at that, saying that he misconstrued her warm sympathy with
the unfortunate; and he, proof against anything but the feminine
tear-gland, as she knew, protested his faith. It was near his lips at
this moment to beg her to treat Ludlow henceforth with mere civility,
but he refrained. When he broached it afterward her pliant mood had
vanished.

"You would have Albany saying that you believe its tittle-tattle," she
argued; and he deferred for the hundredth time to her superior
perception of the mental processes of the social world.

Till the Legislature met in January, the governor was absorbed in the
writing of his annual message, whose recommendations he proposed to
devote almost exclusively to the canals. His committee had completed
its work, and his great plan was muscular and vertebrate in all its
structure, for he contemplated a far-reaching system of legislation
rather than a simple makeshift appropriation of the out-worn type; and
the ultimate goal of it all was to lift the politics-ridden waterway
out of politics alt