man who has just been aroused from a nap.

"Well, I'm sleepy, and I'm going to bed," retorted Patty in reply to his
glance rather than his words, and her tone was bitterly hostile.

"Then I'll see you to-morrow." He had followed her into the wide hall
while the Governor closed the door and stopped to take off his overcoat.
"Did you have a good time?"

She responded with a disdainful movement of her shoulders which might
have been a shrug if she had had French instead of Irish blood in her
veins. In her evening cloak of green velvet trimmed with gray fox she
had the look of a small wild creature of the forest. Beneath her thick
eyelashes her eyes shone through a greenish mist; and at the moment
there was something frightened and furtive in their brightness.

"Of course," she replied defiantly, moving away from him in the
direction of the staircase. "I had a wonderful time--perfectly
wonderful. The people were all so interesting." Her pronunciation was as
deliberately correct as if she were reading from a dictionary. It was
the air of superiority that she always assumed with Gershom, for in no
other way, she had learned from experience, could she irritate him so
intensely.

His jovial manner gave place to a crestfallen look. "Who was there? I
reckon I know the names anyway."

He affected a true republican scorn of appearances; and standing there,
in his dishevelled business clothes beside Patty's ethereal youth, he
looked as hopelessly battered by reality as a political theory, or as
old General Powhatan Plummer of aristocratic descent.

Patty had often wondered what it was about the man that aroused in her
so unconquerable an aversion. He was not ugly compared to many of the
men her father had brought to the house; and ten years ago, when she
first met him in the little country town where they were living, his
curling black hair and sharp black eyes had seemed to her rather
attractive than otherwise. If he had been merely untidy and unashamed in
dress, she might have tolerated the failing as the outward sign of a
distinguished social philosophy; but, even in those early days, his
Jeffersonian simplicity had yielded to an outbreak of vanity. Though his
clothes were unbrushed and his boots were unpolished, he wore a
sparkling pin in his tie and several sparkling rings on his fingers.
There was something else, too, some easy tone of patronage, some
familiar inflexion, which as a child she had hated. Now, after the
e