t objective world of routine and habit. "Yes, I was there.
It was a dull business."

She laughed again with the lack of merriment he had noticed before.
Though her face was made for laughter, there was an oddly conflicting
note of tragedy in her voice. "Was it dull? I didn't notice."

"Then you must have enjoyed it?"

"But you were there. You saw what happened. Every one must have seen."
Her savage candour brushed away the flimsy amenities. He knew now that
she would say whatever she pleased, and, with the pigeon clasped tightly
in his arms, he waited for anything that might come.

"You pretend that you don't know, that you didn't see!" she asked
indignantly.

As she looked at him he thought--or it may have been the effect of the
shifting light--that her eyes diffused soft green rays beneath her black
eyelashes. Was there really the mist of tears in her sparkling glance?

"I am sorry," he said simply, being a young man of few words when the
need of speech was obvious. The last thing he wanted, he told himself,
was to receive the confidences of the Governor's daughter.

At this declaration, so characteristic of his amiable temperament, her
anger flashed over him. "You were not sorry. You know you were not, or
you would have made them kinder!"

"Kinder? But how could I?" He felt that her rage was making her
unreasonable. "I didn't know you. I hadn't even been introduced to you."
It was on the tip of his tongue to add, "and I haven't been yet--" but
he checked himself in fear of unchaining the lightning. It was all
perfectly true. He had not even been introduced to the girl, and here
she was, as crude as life and as intemperate, accusing him of
indifference and falsehood. And after all, what had they done to her? No
one had been openly rude. Nothing had been said, he was sure, absolutely
nothing. It had been a "charity entertainment," and the young people of
his set had merely left her alone, that was all. The affair had been far
from exclusive--for the enterprising ladies of the Beech Tree Day
Nursery had prudently preferred a long subscription list to a limited
social circle--and in a gathering so obscurely "mixed" there were,
without doubt, a number of Gideon Vetch's admirers. Was it maliciously
arranged by Fate that Patty Vetch's social success should depend upon
the people who had elected her father to office?

"As if that mattered!"

Her scorn of his subterfuge, her mocking defiance of the sacred formula