She faced him squarely, with her head held high and her eyes cold and determined.  “What do you want me to do?  Please don’t beat about the bush any longer.”

He hesitated a moment, and she inferred that he was trying to decide how far he might venture with safety.  “Well, I thought you might speak a word to him,” he said.  “He sets such store by what you would like.  I thought you might drop a hint that he ought to stand by his friends.”

“To stand by his friends—­that means you,” she rejoined.

“Oh, he’ll know quick enough what it means!  You must be smart about it, of course, but I don’t mind his knowing that I’ve been speaking to you.  It’s for his own good that I’m talking—­for the very minute that the fellows find out he ain’t been on the square with ’em, it will be ‘nothing doing’ for the Governor.”

“It is a threat, then?” she asked sharply.

“I’d call it something else if I were you.  Look here,” he continued briskly.  “You’d like to see the old man go to the Senate, and maybe higher up, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh, of course.  What has that to do with it?”

He winked and laughed knowingly.  “Well, you just take my advice and drop a hint to him about this business.  Then, perhaps, you’ll see.”

“If he doesn’t take the hint, what will you do?”

“Ask me that in the sweet bye and bye, honey!” His tone had become offensively familiar.  “It’s for his good, you know.  If it’s the last word I ever speak I’m trying to save him from the biggest snag he ever met in his life.”

She had drawn disdainfully away from him; but at his last words she came a step nearer.  “I’ll tell him exactly what you say,” she answered; and then she asked suddenly in a firmer tone:  “Have you heard anything more of my aunt?”

He looked at her intently.  “Why, yes.  You hadn’t mentioned her again, so I thought you’d ceased to be interested.  Would you like to see her?” he demanded abruptly after a pause.

“How can I?  I don’t know where she is.”

For a minute or two before replying he studied her closely.  “I wish you would let your hair grow out, Patty,” he remarked at the end of his examination, and there was a note of genuine feeling in his bantering.  “I remember how pretty you used to look as a little girl, with your hair flying behind you like the mane of a pony.”

“Let my hair alone.  Do you know where my aunt is?”

He appeared to yield reluctantly to her insistence.  “If you’re so bent on knowing—­and, mind you, I tell you only because you make me—­she ain’t so very far from where we are standing.  I could take you to her in ten minutes.”

She looked at him as if she scarcely believed his words.  “You mean that she is in town?”

“Haven’t you known me long enough to find out that I always mean what I say?”

“Then you can take me to her now?”

He laughed shortly, and dug the end of his walking stick between the pavement and the edge of the curbstone.  “What do you reckon the Governor would say to it?”