Yes, the man was a mountebank—­but was he nothing more than a mountebank?  Like most men of his age, Stephen Culpeper was inclined to swift impressions rather than hasty judgments of people; and he was conscious, while he listened in silence to the murmuring explanations of the girl, that the immediate effect was a sensation, not an idea.  At first sight, the Governor appeared merely ordinary—­a tall, rugged figure, built of good bone and muscle and sound to the core, with the look of arrested energy which was doubtless an inheritance from the circus ring.  There was nothing impressive about him; nothing that would cause one to turn and look back in a crowd.  What struck one most was his air of extraordinary freshness and health, of sanguine vitality.  His face was well-coloured and irregular in outline, with a high bulging forehead and thick sandy hair which was already gray on the temples.  In the shadow his eyes did not appear remarkably fine; they seemed at the first glance to be of an indeterminate colour—­was it blue or gray?—­and there was nothing striking in their deep setting under the beetling sandy eyebrows.  All this was true; and yet while Stephen looked into them over the Governor’s outstretched hand, he told himself that they were the most human eyes he had ever seen.  Afterward, when he groped through his vocabulary for a more accurate description, he could not find one.  There was shrewdness in Gideon Vetch’s eyes; there was friendliness; there was the blue sparkle of contagious humour—­a ripple of light that was like visible laughter—­but above all there was humanity.  Though Stephen did not try to grasp the vivid impressions that passed through his mind, he felt intuitively that he had learned to know Gideon Vetch through his look and manner as well as he should have known another man after weeks or months of daily intercourse.  Whatever the man’s private life, whatever his political faults may have been, there was magic in the clasp of his hand and the cordial glow of his smile.  He was always responsive; he stood always on the same level, high or low, with his companion of the moment:  he was as incapable of looking up as he was of looking down; he was equally without reverence and without condescension.  It was the law of his nature that he should give himself emphatically to the just and the unjust alike.

“He came home with me because I hurt my foot,” Patty was saying.

Had she forgotten already, Stephen asked himself cynically, that it was not her foot but her ankle?  His suspicions returned while he looked at her blooming face, and he hoped earnestly that she would not feel impelled to relate any irrelevant details of the adventure.  Like Gideon Vetch on the platform she seemed incapable of withholding the smallest fragment of a fact; and the young man wondered if it were characteristic either of “the plain people,” as he called them, or of circus riders as a class, that their minds should go habitually unclothed yet unashamed.