His duties took him often to the State capital.  The chairman of the State Committee was coolly courteous, often gloomily deferential, sometimes frankly cordial—­uneasily trying to find the proper level to stand on in his intercourse with one who was the grandson of Thelismer Thornton, and also the chosen confidant of the man who had wrested from him control of State affairs.

In the case of Madeleine Presson, there was none of this embarrassment.  He saw her often.  She met him half-way with a frank interest in his work and a sympathy which, in those days of truce, did not question his ideals.

He became a welcome intimate of the Presson household.  When he was there the master himself put aside all the brusqueness he displayed in their down-town discourse on politics.  The girl welcomed him.  There were many hours when they were alone together, in the home or on long drives into the country.  She did not refer to their talk on that evening when she read to him his lesson on practical politics.  He avoided that subject.  He did not want to risk any further disagreement between them on the matter of ideals—­or, for that matter, on any other subject.  Association with her had become too delightful to be put to the test of discussions of political methods.  He was still drawing upon her fund of worldly wisdom.  There was a little touch of the cynic in her.  He became secretly ashamed of some of his ingenuous beliefs, after she had deftly shown him the other side of things.  She did show him the other side, quite in a matter-of-fact way.  It was not that she was trying to break down his faith.  There was nothing sly nor crafty in her methods of improving his views.  But by informing him, she made him wiser, and, at the same time, more distrustful of motives, more searching in his investigations of methods.  He began to doubt some of his earlier ideas of what a public man should be.  He felt that his views were broadening.  That was a comfortable way of excusing certain surrenderings to her ideas.

The more he drew from her the more he was drawn to her.

It was not the love that comes with a rush of the emotions and sweeps a man away.

Through the intellect, through his hunger for information and wider views, she was making herself indispensable to his welfare and his ambitions.

And yet Madeleine Presson was not trying to make this young man of the north country fall in love with her.  Her interest in him was first of all based upon his winning earnestness and the elements of success that she divined in him, were they properly cultivated.  She had studied men at the capital from childhood.  The development of men in public life and service had been the one theme that she had heard most discussed.  Her impulse of assistance had been directed toward this grandson of Thelismer Thornton.