"Father, this is Mr. Culpeper," remarked Patty calmly, as she sank on a
sofa and stretched out her frivolous shoes.

In the midst of his embarrassment Stephen wondered resentfully how she
had discovered his name.




CHAPTER II

GIDEON VETCH


"Your daughter slipped on the ice," explained the young man, while the
thought flashed through his mind that Patty's father was accepting it
all, with ironical humour, as some queer masquerade.

It was the first time that Stephen had come within range of the
Governor's personal influence, and he found himself waiting curiously
for the response of his sympathies or his nerves. Once or twice he had
heard Vetch speak--a storm of words which had played freely from the
lightning flash of humorous invective to the rolling thunder of
passionate denunciation. Such sound and fury had left Stephen the one
unmoved man in the audience. He had been brought up on the sonorous
rhetoric and the gorgeous purple periods of the classic orations; and
the mere undraped sincerity--the raw head and bloody bones eloquence, as
he put it, of Vetch's speech had been as offensive to his taste as it
had been unconvincing to his intelligence. The man was a mountebank,