always, the thought of a child who had loved his home and his people and who had tried so hard, so long, to bring them together.  He knew the dream-child would not visit him again—­the little ghost was laid that had followed him all his life.  From over the border whence it had come with so many loving efforts it would never come again.  Slowly, with the heavy weight in his arms, he walked back to the garden sleeping in the sunshine, and the box hedges met him with a wave of fragrance, the sweetness of a century ago; and as he passed through their shining door, looking beyond, he saw Shelby.  The girl’s figure stood by the stone column of the garden entrance, the light shone on her bare head, and she had stopped, surprised, as she saw him.  Philip’s pace quickened with his heart-throb as he looked at her and thought of the little ghostly hands that had brought theirs together; and as he looked the smile that meant his welcome and his happiness broke over her face, and with the sound of her voice all the shades of this world and the next dissolved in light.

“‘Christmas gif’,’ Marse Philip!” called Shelby.

THE WIFE OF THE GOVERNOR

The Governor sat at the head of the big black-oak table in his big stately library.  The large lamps on either end of the table stood in old cloisonne vases of dull rich reds and bronzes, and their shades were of thick yellow silk.  The light they cast on the six anxious faces grouped about them was like the light in Rembrandt’s picture of The Clinic.

It was a very important meeting indeed.  A city official, who had for months been rather too playfully skating on the thin ice of bare respect for the law, had just now, in the opinion of many, broken through.  He had followed a general order of the Governor’s by a special order of his own, contradicting the first in words not at all, but in spirit from beginning to end.  And the Governor wished to make an example of him—­now, instantly, so promptly and so thoroughly that those who ran might read, in large type, that the attempt was not a success.  He was young for a Governor—­thirty-six years old—­and it may be that care for the dignity of his office was not his only feeling on the subject.

“I won’t be badgered, you know,” he said to the senior Senator of the State.  “If the man wishes to see what I do when I’m ugly, I propose to show him.  Show me reason, if you can, why this chap shouldn’t be indicted.”

To which they answered various things; for while they sympathized, and agreed in the main, yet several were for temporizing, and most of them for going a bit slowly.  But the Governor was impetuous and indignant.  And here the case stood when there came a knock at the library door.

The Governor looked up in surprise, for it was against all orders that he should be disturbed at a meeting.  But he spoke a “Come in,” and Jackson, the stately colored butler, appeared, looking distressed and alarmed.