“I cannot do a thing that my Secretary of State and his lawyers declare unconstitutional, Patricia,” answered the voice of the Gouverneur Faulkner, in which were notes of pain.  “You know how it pains me—­my God, don’t tempt me to—­” His voice shook as I saw the beautiful, bare white arms of Madam Whitworth raise themselves and go about his neck like great white grappling hooks from which he was unable to defend himself.

“Am I to have nothing from life—­no ease or luxury and no—­love or—­” Her voice ended in sobs as she pressed her head down into his shoulder as his arm folded about her to prevent that she should fall.

“Patricia—­” the deep voice of the strong man was beginning to say as I was starting to spring forward in his defense and to do—­I do not know what—­when a firm grasp was laid upon my shoulder and I was turned away from the window into the light of the wide hall and found my Uncle, the General Robert, looking down into my flashing eyes with a great and very cool calmness.

“Young man,” he said as he gave to me a very powerful shake, “all women are poison but some are vitriol and others just—­Oh, well, paregoric.  Go out there and take another dose of that soothing syrup labeled Susan Tomlinson, before I take you home, and you—­keep—­a
way—­from—­vitriol—­or—­I’ll—­break—­your—­hot—­young—­ head.  Vitriol, mind you!” With which command my Uncle, the General Robert, strode down the hall in the direction of the smoking room and left me blinking in the lights of the wide hall.

“Little Mas’ Robert,” came in a soft voice at my elbow as I stood tottering, “is you got a picture of yo’ mudder you could show Cato some day when the General ain’t lookin’.  ’Fore I dies I wants to set my eyes on de woman dat drawed little Mas’ Henry away from us all.  Dey is such a thing in dis hard old world as love what you goes ‘crost many waters’ to git, and he shorely got it.”  And I looked into the eyes of that old black man to find a truth that all the white humans about me, myself included, were acting in the terms of a lie.

Before I could answer the old man, in through the window came the Gouverneur Faulkner and the beautiful Madam Whitworth, and from his white face set in sternness and hers with its smile of the opening rose upon its red mouth I could not tell whether his honor had been slain or had been spared for another round.

“I’ll want you in my office at the Capitol at eleven to-morrow, Robert,” he said to me, and there was a cold sternness in his glance as they passed by me and the old Cato into the ballroom.

“At four,” murmured the beautiful Madam Whitworth as she swept past me with a soft smile but in a tone of voice too low for any ears save my own and I think of the old Cato’s.

For a very short moment the old black man detained me as he searched one of the pockets of his long gray coat and then he handed to me a tiny flat parcel apparently folded in some kind of thin red cloth.