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II

IT was the custodian of his own hidden treasure who at this moment broke in upon his musings. Mrs. Mornway, fresh from her afternoon walk, entered the room with that air of ease and lightness which seemed to diffuse a social warmth about her; fine, slender, pliant, so polished and modeled by an intelligent experience of life that youth seemed clumsy in her presence. She looked down at her husband and shook her head.

“You promised to keep the afternoon to yourself, and I hear Grace has been here.”

“Poor Grace–she didn’t stay long, and I should have been a brute not to see her.”

He leaned back, filling his gaze to the brim with her charming image, which obliterated at a stroke the fretful ghost of Mrs. Nimick.

“She came to congratulate you, I suppose?”

“Yes, and to ask me to do something for Ashford.”

“Ah–on account of Jack. What does she want for him?”

The Governor laughed. “She said you were in her confidence–that you were backing her up. She seemed to think your support would ensure her success.”

Mrs. Mornway smiled; her smile, always full of delicate implications, seemed to caress her husband while it gently mocked his sister.

“Poor Grace! I suppose you undeceived her.”

“As to your influence? I told her it was paramount where it ought to be.”

“And where is that?”

“In the choice of carpets and curtains. It seems ours are almost too good.”

“Thanks for the compliment! Too good for what?”

“Our station in life, I suppose. At least they seemed to bother Grace.”

“Poor Grace! I’ve always bothered her.” She paused, removing her gloves reflectively and laying her long fine hands on his shoulders as she stood behind him. “Then you don’t believe in Ashford?” Feeling his slight start, she drew away her hands and raised them to detach her veil.

“What makes you think I don’t believe in Ashford?” he asked.

“I asked out of curiosity. I wondered whether you had decided anything.”

“No, and I don’t mean to for a week. I’m dead beat, and I want to bring a fresh mind to the question. There is hardly one appointment I’m sure of except, of course, Fleetwood’s.”

She turned away from him, smoothing her hair in the mirror above the mantelpiece. “You’re sure of that?” she asked after a moment.

“Of George Fleetwood? And poor Grace thinks you are deep in my counsels! I am as sure of re-appointing Fleetwood as I am that I have just been re-elected myself. I’ve never made any secret of the fact that if they wanted me back they must have him, too.”

“You are tremendously generous!” she murmured.

“Generous? What a strange word to use! Fleetwood is my trump card–the one man I can count on to carry out my ideas through thick and thin.”

She mused on this, smiling a little. “That’s why I call you generous–when I remember how you disliked him two years ago!”

“What of that? I was prejudiced against him, I own; or rather, I had a just distrust of a man with such a past. But how splendidly he’s wiped it out! What a record he has written on the new leaf he promised to turn over if I gave him the chance! Do you know,” the Governor interrupted himself with a pleasantly reminiscent laugh, “I was rather annoyed with Grace when she hinted that you had promised to back up Ashford–I told her you didn’t aspire to distribute patronage. But she might have reminded me–if she’d known–that it wasyou who persuaded me to give Fleetwood that chance.”

Mrs. Mornway turned with a slight heightening of color. “Grace–how could she possibly have known?”

“She couldn’t, of course, unless she’d read my weakness in my face. But why do you look so startled at my little joke?”

“It’s only that I so dislike Grace’s ineradicable idea that I am a wire-puller. Why should she imagine I would help her about Ashford?”

“Oh, Grace has always been a mild and ineffectual conspirator, and she thinks every other woman is built on the same plan. But you didget Fleetwood’s job for him, you know,” he repeated with laughing insistence.