He did as he was bidden, and when she was served he stood over her, wondering, as other men had wondered, what was the precise secret of her charm.  Loring had told him Miss Van Brock’s story.  She was southern born, the only child of a somewhat ill-considered match between a young California lawyer, wire-pulling in the national capital in the interest of the Central Pacific Railroad, and a Virginia belle tasting the delights of her first winter in Washington.

Later, the young lawyer’s state, or his employers, had sent him to Congress; and Portia, left motherless in her middle childhood, had grown up in an atmosphere of statecraft, or what passes for such, in an era of frank commercialism.  Inheriting her mother’s rare beauty of face and form, and uniting with it a sympathetic gift in grasp of detail, political and other, she soon became her father’s confidante and loyal partizan, taking the place, as a daughter might, of the ambitious young wife and mother, who had set her heart on seeing the Van Brock name on the roll of the United States Senate.

Rensselaer Van Brock had died before the senatorial dream could be realized, but not before he had made a sufficient number of lucky investments to leave his daughter the arbitress of her own future.  What that future should be, not even Loring could guess.  Since her father’s death Miss Van Brock had been a citizen of the world.  With a widowed aunt for the shadowiest of chaperons, she had drifted with the tide of inclination, coming finally to rest in the western capital for no better reason, perhaps, than that some portion of her interest-bearing securities were emblazoned with the great seal of this particular western State.

Kent was thinking of Loring’s recountal as he stood looking down on her.  Other women were younger—­and with features more conventionally beautiful; Kent could find a round dozen within easy eye-reach, to say nothing of the calm-eyed, queenly improvisatrice at the piano—­his constant standard of all womanly charm and grace.  Unconsciously he fell to comparing the two, his hostess and his love, and was brought back to things present by a sharp reminder from Portia.

“Stop looking at Miss Brentwood that way, Mr. David.  She is not for you; and you are keeping me waiting.”

He smiled down on her.

“It is the law of compensation.  I fancy you have kept many a man waiting—­and will keep many another.”

There was a little tang of bitterness in her laugh.

“You remind me of the time when I went home from school—­oh, years and years ago.  Old Chloe—­she was my black mammy, you know—­had a grown daughter of her own, and her effort to dispose of her ‘M’randy’ was a standing joke in the family.  In answer to my stereotyped question she stood back and folded her arms.  ’Naw, honey; dat M’randy ain’t ma’ied yit.  She gwine be des lak you; look pretty, an’ say, Howdy!  Misteh Jawnson, an’ go ‘long by awn turrer side de road.’”