“Can’t help it, Miss Lindsay.  They have no respect for me.  I’m that sort of man.  Hard luck, isn’t it?”

Lindsay turned her sad, infantile gray eyes on him searchingly.  “I reckon you’re not,” she said.  “I reckon you’re the sort of man people don’t say things to unless they’re right sure you will stand it.  They don’t trifle with you.”  She nodded her head with conviction.  “Oh, I’ve heard them talk about you!  I like that; that’s like our men down South.  You’re right Southern, anyhow, in some ways.  You see, I can pay you compliments because you’re a safe old married man,” and her eyes smiled up at him:  she rarely laughed or smiled except with those lovely eyes.  “There’s some joke about your wife,” she went on, “that you-all won’t tell me.  There certainly is.  I know it, sure enough I do, Governor Rudd.”

There is a common belief that the Southern accent can be faithfully rendered in writing if only one spells badly enough.  No amount of bad spelling could tell how softly Lindsay Lee said those last two words.

“I love to hear you say that—­’Guv’na Rudd.’  I do, ’sho ‘nuff,’” mused the Governor out loud and irrelevantly.  “Would you say it again?”

“I wouldn’t,” said Lindsay, with asperity.  “Ridiculous!  If you are a Governor!  But I was talking about your wife.  Isn’t she coming home before I go?  Sometimes I don’t believe you have a wife.”

That was his chance, and he saw it.  He must tell her now or never, and he drew a long breath.  “Suppose I told you that I had not,” he said, “that she was a myth, what would you say?”

“Oh, I’d just never speak to you again,” said Lindsay, carelessly.  “I wouldn’t like to be fooled like that.  Look, there are the others!” and off she flew at a canter.

It is easy to see that the Governor was not hurried headlong into confession by that speech.  But the crash came.  It was the night before Lindsay was to go back home to far-off Kentucky, and with infinite expenditure of highly trained intellect, for which the State was paying a generous salary, the Governor had managed to find himself floating on a moonlit flood through the Forest of Arden with the Blessed Damozel.  That, at least, is the rendering of a walk in the McNaughtons’ wood with Lindsay Lee as it appeared that night to the intellect mentioned.  But the language of such thoughts is idiomatic and incapable of exact translation.  A flame of eagerness to speak, quenched every moment by a shower-bath of fear, burned in his soul, when suddenly Lindsay tripped on a root and fell, with an exclamation.  Then fear dried beneath the flames.  It is unnecessary to tell what the Governor did, or what he said.  The language, as language, was unoriginal and of striking monotony, and as to what happened, most people have had experience which will obviate the necessity of going into brutal facts.  But when, trembling and shaken, he realized a material world again, Lindsay was fighting him, pushing him away, her eyes blazing fiercely.