He rang the bell, and the door was opened by an old coloured butler who had been one of the family servants of the Culpepers.  How on earth, Stephen wondered, could the Governor tolerate the venerable Abijah, the chosen companion of Culpeper children for two generations?  While he wondered he recalled something his mother had said a few weeks ago about Abijah’s having been lured away by the offer of absurd wages.  “You needn’t worry,” she had added shrewdly, “he will return as soon as he gets tired of working.”

“I hurt my ankle, Abijah,” said the girl.

“You ain’t, is you, Miss Patty?” replied Abijah, in an indulgent tone which conveyed to Stephen’s delicate ears every shade of difference between the Vetchs’ and the Culpepers’ social standing.

“How are you, Abijah?” remarked the young man with the air of lordly pleasantry he used to all servants who were not white.  Beyond the fine old hall he saw the formal drawing-room and the modern octagonal dining-room at the back of the house.

“Howdy, Marse Stephen,” responded the negro, “I seed yo’ ma yestiddy en she sutney wuz lookin well an’ peart.”

He opened the door of the library, and while Stephen entered the room with the girl’s hand on his arm, a man rose from a chair by the fire and came forward.

“Father, this is Mr. Culpeper,” remarked Patty calmly, as she sank on a sofa and stretched out her frivolous shoes.

In the midst of his embarrassment Stephen wondered resentfully how she had discovered his name.

CHAPTER II

GIDEON VETCH

“Your daughter slipped on the ice,” explained the young man, while the thought flashed through his mind that Patty’s father was accepting it all, with ironical humour, as some queer masquerade.

It was the first time that Stephen had come within range of the Governor’s personal influence, and he found himself waiting curiously for the response of his sympathies or his nerves.  Once or twice he had heard Vetch speak—­a storm of words which had played freely from the lightning flash of humorous invective to the rolling thunder of passionate denunciation.  Such sound and fury had left Stephen the one unmoved man in the audience.  He had been brought up on the sonorous rhetoric and the gorgeous purple periods of the classic orations; and the mere undraped sincerity—­the raw head and bloody bones eloquence, as he put it, of Vetch’s speech had been as offensive to his taste as it had been unconvincing to his intelligence.  The man was a mountebank, nothing more, Stephen had decided, and his strange power was simply the reaction of mob hysteria to the stage tricks of the political clown.