“Thank you, sir,” said the Governor without effusion; and he asked:  “Did you hurt yourself, Patty?” while he bent over and laid his hand on her ankle.

A note of tenderness passed into his voice as he turned to the girl; and when she answered after a minute, Stephen recognized the same tone of affectionate playfulness that she used when she spoke of him.

“Not much,” she replied carelessly.  Then she held out the drooping pigeon.  “I found this bird.  Is there anything we can do for it?”

The Governor took the bird from her, and examined it under the light with the manner of brisk confidence which directed his slightest action.  The man, for all his restless activity, appeared to be without excess or exaggeration when it was a matter of practical detail.  He apparently employed his whole efficient and enterprising mind on the incident of the bird.

“The wings aren’t broken,” he said presently, lifting his head, “but it is weak from hunger and exhaustion,” and he rang the bell for Abijah.  “Rice and water and a warm basket,” he ordered when the old negro appeared.  “You had better keep it in the house until it recovers.”  Then dismissing the subject, he turned back to Stephen.

“Well, I am glad to see you, Mr. Culpeper,” he said.  “You had a hard beginning, but, as they used to tell me when I was a kid, a hard beginning makes a good ending.”

For the first time a smile softened his face, and the roving blue gleam danced blithely in his eyes.  A moment before the young man had thought the Governor’s face harsh and ugly.  Now he remembered that the Judge had said “the man was not half bad to look at if you caught him smiling.”  Yes, he had a charm of his own, and that charm had swept him forward over every obstacle to the place he had reached.  A single gift, indefinable yet unerring—­the ability to make men believe absurdities, as John Benham had once said—­and the material disadvantages of poverty and ignorance were brushed aside like trivial impediments.  A strange power, and a dangerous one in unscrupulous hands, the young man reflected.

“I remember your face,” pursued the Governor, while his smile faded—­was brevity, after all, the secret of its magic?  “You were at one of my speeches last autumn, and you sat in the front row, I think.  I recall you because you were the only person in the audience who looked bored.”

“I was.”  Frankness called for frankness.  “I am not keen about speeches.”

“Not even when Benham speaks?” The voice was gay, but through it all there rang the unmistakable tone of authority, of conscious power.  There was one person, Stephen inferred, who had never from the beginning disparaged or ridiculed Gideon Vetch, and that person was Gideon Vetch himself.  John Benham had once said that the man was a mere posturer—­but John Benham was wrong.

“Oh, well, you see, Benham is different,” replied the young man as delicately as he could.  “He is apt to say only what I think, you know.”