Chuck (with heavy artillery).  “Alice, taisez-vous.  You’re doing poorly.  You can’t converse.  Your best parlor trick is your red hair.  Miss Lee, I’ll show you a picture of Mrs. Rudd some day, and I’ll tell you now what she looks like.  She has exquisite melancholy gray eyes, a mouth like a ripe tomato” (shouts from the table en masse, but Chuck ploughs along cheerily), “hair like the braided midnight” (cries of “What’s that?” and “Hear!  Hear!"), “a figure slim and willowy as a vaulting-pole” (a protest of “No track athletics at meals; that’s forbidden!"), “and a voice—­well, if you ever tasted New Orleans molasses on maple sugar, with ‘that tired feeling’ thrown in, perhaps you’ll have a glimpse, a mile off, of what that voice is like.” (Eager exclamations of “That’s near enough,” “Don’t do it any more, Chuck,” and “For Heaven’s sake, Charlie, stop.”  Lindsay looks hard with the gray eyes at the Governor.)

Lindsay, “Why don’t you pull your bowie-knife out of your boot, Governor?  It looks like he’s making fun of your wife, to me.  Isn’t anybody going to fight anybody?”

And then Mr. McNaughton would reprove her as a bloodthirsty Kentuckian, and the whole laughing tableful would empty out on the broad porch.  At such a time the Governor, laughing too, amused, yet uncomfortable, and feeling himself in a false and undignified position, would vow solemnly that a stop must be put to all this.  It would get about, into the papers even, by horrid possibility; even now a few intimates of the McNaughton family had been warned “not to kill the Governor’s wife.”  He would surely tell the girl the next time he could find her alone, and then the absurdity would collapse.  But the words would not come, or if he carefully framed them beforehand, this bold, aggressive leader of men, whose nickname was “Jack the Giant-killer,” made a giant of Lindsay’s displeasure, and was afraid of it.  He had never been afraid of anything before.  He would screw his courage up to the notch, and then, one look at the childlike face, and down it would go, and he would ask her to go rowing with him.  They were such good friends; it was so dangerous to change at a blow existing relations, to tell her that he had been deceiving her all these weeks.  These exquisite June weeks that had flown past to music such us no June had made before; days snowed under with roses, nights that seemed, as he remembered them, moonlit for a solid month.  The Governor sighed a lingering sigh, and quoted,

    “Oh what a tangled web we weave
    When first we practise to deceive!”

Yes, he must really wait—­say two days longer.  Then he might be sure enough of her—­regard—­to tell her the truth.  And then, a little later, if he could control himself so long, another truth.  Beyond that he did not allow himself to think.

“Governor Rudd,” asked Lindsay suddenly as they walked their horses the last mile home from a ride on which they had gotten separated—­the Governor knew how—­from the rest of the party, “why do they bother you so about your wife, and why do you let them?”