“What do you mean?  What do you mean?” she was saying.

“Mean—­mean?  That I love you—­that I want you to love me, to be my wife!” She stood up like a white ghost in the silver light and shadow of the wood.

“Governor Rudd, are you crazy?” she cried.  “You have a wife already.”

The tall Governor threw back his head and laughed a laugh like a child.  The people away off on the porch heard him and smiled.  “They are having a good time, those two,” Mrs. McNaughton said.

“Lindsay—­Lindsay,” and he bent over and caught her hands and kissed them.  “There isn’t any wife—­there never will be any but you.  It was all a joke.  It happened because—­Oh, never mind!  I can’t tell you now; it’s a long story.  But you must forgive that; that’s all in the past now.  The question is, will you love me—­will you love me, Lindsay?  Tell me, Lindsay!” He could not say her name often enough.  But there came no answering light in Lindsay’s face.  She looked at him as if he were a striped convict.

“I’ll never forgive you,” she said, slowly.  “You’ve treated me like a child; you’ve made a fool of me, all of you.  It was insulting.  All a joke, you call it?  And I was the joke; you’ve been laughing at me all these weeks.  Why was it funny, I’d like to know?”

“Great heavens, Lindsay—­you’re not going to take it that way?  I insult you—­laugh at you!  I’d give my life; I’d shoot down any one—­Lindsay!” he broke out appealingly, and made a step toward her.

“Don’t touch me!” she cried.  “Don’t touch me!  I hate you!” And as he still came closer she turned and ran up the path, into the moonlight of the driveway, and so, a dim white blotch on the fragrant night, disappeared.

When the Governor, walking with dignity, came up the steps of the porch, three minutes later, he was greeted with questions.

“What have you done to Lindsay Lee, I’d like to know?” asked Alice McNaughton.  “She said she had fallen and hurt her foot, but she wouldn’t let me go up with her, and she was dignified, which is awfully trying.  Why did you quarrel with her, this last night?”

“Governor,” said Chuck, with more discernment than delicacy, “if you will accept the sympathies of one not unacquainted with grief—­” But at this point his voice faded away as he looked at the Governor.

The Governor never remembered just how he got away from the friendly hatefulness of that porchful.  An early train the next morning was inevitable, for there was a meeting of real importance this time, and at all events everything looked about the same shade of gray to him; it mattered very little what he did.  Only he must be doing something every moment.  He devoured work as if it were bread and meat and he were famished.  People said all that autumn and winter that anything like the Governor’s energy had never been seen.  He evidently wanted a second term, and really he ought to have it.  He was working hard enough to get it.  About New-Year’s he went down to Bristol for the first time since June, for a dinner at the McNaughtons’.  Alice McNaughton’s friendly face, under its red-gold hair, beamed at him from far away down the table, but after dinner, when the men came in from the dining-room, she took possession of him boldly.