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“With love,” said Joe. “From Hector.” And he stalked majestically out.

There was a card on the wreath, which Joe had inscribed: “To announce the betrothal. No regrets.”

Sure enough, the next morning I had a letter from Mary, telling me that Hector and Miss Rainey were engaged, that they had been so without announcing it, for several years, and she feared the engagement must last much longer before they could be married. So did I, for all of Hector’s glittering had brought him very little money. While he had some law practice, of course it was small, in Greenville, and what he had he neglected. Nor was he a good lawyer. I knew him to be heavily in debt to Lane, whose father had died lately, leaving Joe fairly well off; and I knew also that this debt sat very lightly on Hector. I judged so, because in the matter of the advances I had made for his education, I never heard him refer to them. Probably he forgot all about it, having so many more important things to think of.

Mary was right: it was a very long engagement. It had lasted seven years in all, when Passley Trimmer declared himself a candidate for the nomination for Governor and gave Hector the great chance he had been waiting for. Hector “came out” for Trimmer, and came out strong. He worked for him day and night, and he was one of the best cards in Trimmer’s hand.

It was easy enough to understand: Trimmer’s nomination would leave his seat in Congress vacant and the Trimmer crowd would throw it to Hector.

You could see that the “young Lochinvar” was really a power, and I think they counted on him almost as much as on the personal machine Trimmer had built up. Most of all, they counted on Hector’s speech, nominating Trimmer, to stampede the convention. If it was to be done, Hector was the man to do it. There’s no doubt in the world of the extraordinary capacity he had for whirling a crowd along into a kind of insane enthusiasm. He could make his audience enthusiastic about anything; he could have brought them to their feet waving and cheering for Ben Butler himself, if he had set out to do it. I believe that most of us who were against Trimmer were more afraid of Hector’s stampeding the convention than of Trimmer’s machine and all the money he was spending.

I was working all I knew for another man, Henderson, of my county, and our delegation would go into the convention sixty-three solid for Henderson, first, last, and all the time. On that account I had to play Barras again to the young Napoleon. He came to see me, and made one of his orations, imploring me to swing half of our delegation for Trimmer on the first ballot, and all of it on the second.

“But they count on me!” he declaimed. “They count on me to turn you! Is a man to be denied by his own flesh and blood? Are the ties of relationship nothing? Can’t you see that my whole future is put in jeopardy by your refusal? Here is my opportunity at last and you endanger it. My marriage and my fortune depend on it; the cup is at my lips. My long years of toil and preparation, the bitter, bitter waiting–are these things to go for nothing? I tell you that if you refuse me you may blast the most sacred hopes that ever dwelt in a human breast!”

I only smoked on, and so he did “the jury pathetic,” and he was sincere in it, too.

“Have you no heart?” he inquired, his voice shaking. “Can you think calmly of my mother? Remember the years she has waited to see this recognition come to her son! Am I to go back to her and tell her that your answer was ‘No’? I ask you to think of her, I ask you to put self out of your thoughts, to forget your own interests for once, and to think of my mother, waiting in the old home in the quiet village street where you knew her in her bright girlhood. Remember that she awaits your answer; forget me if you will, but remember what it means to her, I say, and then if there is a stone in your breast, instead of a human heart, speak the word ‘No’!”